


Mac and Dennis Conduct an Experiment

by pavonine



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Minor Violence, Sexual Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-14 13:32:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8015881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pavonine/pseuds/pavonine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dennis convinces Mac that the only surefire way to prove his straightness is to sexually experiment with another man. Of course that man happens to be Dennis. Of course Mac buys into this as a reasonable plan of action. </p><p>Of course it backfires on them both.</p><p>Set somewhere in the middle of Season 8. Warnings really only apply later on in the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All due thanks to my beta, [Jenna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/volunteerfd/pseuds/volunteerfd), who whipped this story into shape and rightfully knocked me for my flagrant abuse of dialogue tags.

Hunched over the wooden crate with a beer in his hand, Mac stares at Dennis with his brows knotted together in a state of deep confusion. “I still don’t think I get it.”

“All I’m saying,” Dennis explains, “is if you treat it as an experiment, then you don’t have to count it, what part of that are you not getting?”

“Okay, but _how_ doesn’t it count, though? You’re still having gay sex.”

Dennis rolls his eyes. “Because you’re _experimenting_ ,” he tells Mac, slouching back against the pool table. “It’s like driving a car off the lot before you decide to buy it. That’s really what conducting an experiment comes down to—you’re putting yourself in a temporarily questionable circumstance to see what the outcome is like. All _you_ need to do is bang one dude.”

Temporarily questionable. Temporary is good. Questionable, well… Mac taps the rim of his bottle to his chin. “Just one?”

Dennis nods, pulling from his beer. “Just one,” he says. “It all hinges on that one guy. Mac, hear me out. You bang a dude and you decide you don’t like it. Boom, you’re not gay. Simple as that.”

Mac scowls, because it sounds correct, but he’s six beers in. On the other hand, Dennis knows a lot about these things, and he’s still a beer behind Mac. “But what about the banging one dude makes the central act not gay?”

“The act itself honestly doesn’t matter,” Dennis says. “You think some gay guy banging a hundred women’s gonna make him any less gay?”

Mac has to think about that one. That’s a lot of women to go through. “Maybe?” he says. “I mean, that’s a lot of women to go through. Wouldn’t a gay guy soon reach a point where he’s just sick of banging chicks all the time? Because, let’s face it, that’s like a really easy point to reach—”

“Look, Mac, the number doesn’t matter,” Dennis interrupts, “the gay guy could have sex with _one_ chick for all I care. Because at the end of the day, you’re right, he will realize that he’s sick of it, because that’s _not what he wants_. So.” Dennis points his beer at Mac. “If you flip that around…”

The pieces are starting to fall together. “If I plow one dude,” Mac says slowly, “and it _sucks_ , then I’m definitely not gay!”

Dennis shrugs. “Pretty much,” he says. “You only gotta do it once to make sure it’s not for you.”

Mac frowns at this. Nothing ever works out like you plan it. “What if I don’t hate it though? Not that I wouldn’t, it’s obvious I would, but I’m just curious.”

Dennis gives him a somber, slow shrug. “Shit out of luck there, pal,” he says. “But it’s not like you need to worry about that, do you?”

Mac’s still frowning, but he can’t read anything further into Dennis’s calm, placid expression. “Yeah,” he mutters, “no worries there. So, what, I just go out and find some dude to plow, or…”

Dennis shakes his head. “As a matter of fact,” he says, “I’ve got someone in mind already.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do, Mac.” And Dennis grins. “Me.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Gang reacts, Dennis enacts, and Mac cracks.

Dumbfounded is a uniquely apt word to describe Mac’s reaction, as he finds Dennis’s answer to be extraordinarily dumb. “Wait, hold up,” he says, the words rushing out in a tumble. “You want me to bang _you_?”

“Correct,” Dennis says.

“No no no,” Mac says, “you’re not—no dude, you’ve got it all wrong.” He’s standing, brandishing his beer at Dennis like a blunt weapon, backing his way towards the bar and the emergency tequila he keeps stashed behind the pitchers. “You’ve got it _all_ wrong.”

Frank walks in, hopping up to the counter just as Mac sequesters himself behind the bar. “Got what all wrong?”

“ _None_ of your business, Frank,” Mac says. The tequila is half-full and right where he left it. He digs out one of the cleaner shot glasses and slams it on the countertop.

Frank frowns at him. “What crawled up your ass and died?” he says.

“Do _not_ talk to me about asses.”

“All right, I won’t.” Spinning the bar stool around, he faces Dennis and jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “What crawled up his ass and died?”

“Dennis, don’t tell him, for the love of _all_ that is holy,” Mac says, struggling to keep his voice from quavering. “This is between you and me.”

“What’s between you and me?” Charlie asks, popping up right next to Frank.

“ _Where_ are you people coming from?” Mac says. There’s a shrill note to his voice that doesn’t belong, and Dennis is just _standing_ there. _Smiling_. Like a _terrible person_.

“I just walked in with Frank,” Charlie says, and nods his head at the tequila. “We having a party or something?”

“No. We are not having a party. I’m having a party and none of you are invited,” Mac says.

“Gonna be more of a pity party than anything else,” Dee says, sliding onto a barstool. “I’m not surprised.”

“ _Again, where are you people coming from_?” Mac shrieks.

Dee scowls. “I was here before you guys,” she says. “I opened up the bar this morning, remember?”

Mac doesn’t remember and Mac doesn’t care. “I don’t need your pity,” he snaps, “you’re definitely not invited to this.”

Frank wrinkles his nose and nods to the shot glass. “Pity or no, if we’re having a party, I want in. Pour me a shot already.”

“You don’t get tequila. _None_ of you get tequila. This is my party and only I get tequila,” Mac says. He downs a shot and almost immediately lines up a second.

“You okay, buddy?” Charlie asks, eyeing him with certain concern. Mac just says _nothing_.

Dennis glances idly at his nails. “He’s mad because I offered to let him bang me for an experiment I’m proposing,” he says.

Three shocked pairs of eyeballs round on Mac.

“What—I—I’m not, that’s not what this is—”

“You’re finally doing that, are you.” “Jesus Christ, Mac, you know how many _diseases_ he’s gotta have?” “Wait, are you doing the banging or is Dennis doing the banging?”

Mac’s frustration is on the burner and fast approaching a boiling point. “Dee, we are _not_ doing that; Frank, I don’t and do _not_ wanna know; and Charlie—Jesus Christ, guys, _nobody is doing any banging!_ ”

“Not yet,” Dennis says, nonchalant. It takes all of Mac’s willpower to keep from yelling. 

Dee cocks her head at Dennis. “Why’d you offer to do _that_?”

“Because.” Dennis shrugs like it should be obvious. “If Mac has sex with one man— _just_ one man, mind you—then he can settle, once and for all, the big, possibly gay elephant in the room.”

“Possibly _straight_. Probably. Definitely straight,” Mac says. He sets the emergency tequila back down on the bar as a third shot burns its way down his throat. Three should be enough to make him forget this is happening; some party this turned out to be. “I’m not having sex with you, Dennis.”

“Yeah, why’s it gotta be _you_?” Charlie says. “Why isn’t it, like, some random dude you pulled off the streets? Or a hooker? Male hooker—those exist, right? Why not that?”

“Yeah, dude—I was on board until you told me it had to be you,” Mac says. His hand slices from his chest to Dennis’s politely amused smile. “Deal’s off. I’m calling it off.”

A complete idiot would assume Dennis would drop the matter and leave it alone. Maybe that says something about Mac, but he holds out hope until the last microsecond when Dennis sits up a few more offended inches in his seat, shocked and appalled by the very notion. He blinks his big beautiful blue eyes at Mac, practically batting his long lashes, and says, “Are you saying you _don’t_ want to have sex with me?”

Even thinking about it sets off a system failure; Mac’s brain stops and his heart hammers and he’s pretty sure he gapes at Dennis long enough for his face to stick that way. “Of course I don’t, dude!” he says eventually. “You’re my best friend!”

“What—dude, _I’m_ your best friend,” Charlie says, and this little impish smirk appears on Dennis’s lips, like he’s playing a game and doing horribly well. “From _childhood_.”

“All right then, Charlie,” Dennis says, “would _you_ like to bang Mac?”

Charlie hesitates. “Well, uh,” he says. “No, not—hey, no offense, buddy.” He turns to the counter and the pale, slightly swaying man behind it. “But I’m not really into butt stuff, and like, we’re cool as friends, so…”

Dennis sweeps a hand out at the Gang, smiles like a king at his people, benevolent and wise and secretly loathed by at least one upstart rebel. “See, of the four of you,” he says, “I’m the only one _willing_ to have sex with Mac. A sacred burden of friendship, you might even call it.”

“Or you could just do the easy thing and hook Mac up with a date,” Dee says. “Get him on Grindr and turn him loose.”

“And risk him catching God knows what, _who_ knows where, from _who even knows_?” Dennis shudders. “Dee, guys, when you compare me to even the smallest sample of Philadelphia’s most eligible bachelors, there’s really no other choice to be made.”

He starts counting off on his fingers. “I’m the one who knows Mac the best. I know his habits, his sexual likes and dislikes. I’ve heard all of his conquests through my bedroom wall for the past several years, so I know completely what to expect. I’m experienced, I’m _attractive_ —”

“You’re a whore,” Frank says, “we get it.”

“I am a _caring and devoted friend_ who’s willing to take one for the team,” Dennis says, a hand fanning over his heart. “You guys should feel honored I’m even suggesting this.”

“I’m not doing it,” Mac says. “I’m not sleeping with you, Dennis. Or banging you. _Or_ whatever else people do to have gay sex.”

Frank shrugs. “Butt stuff, hand stuff, and mouth stuff,” he says. “Really pretty close to straight sex, but you got two dicks going. And no poon.”

“What about lesbians?” Charlie asks, “do they do anything different?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Their time of the month,” Frank says. “Like werewolves, really.”

“I didn’t know lesbians were related to werewolves.”

Mac grips the edge of the bar; whether it’s to steady himself or stop himself from strangling everyone is anyone’s guess. “Look, it doesn’t matter how many dicks or lesbians or werewolves are actually involved, the answer’s _no._ Okay, Dennis?”

Dennis’s demeanor finally starts to crack. His smile pinches tight across his face and his eyes glitter, hard and sharp like cut sapphires. “So let me get this straight,” he says. “You come to me, what, complaining that no one takes you at face value when you say you’re straight, and when I offer up a reasonable solution you reject it outright?”

“Look, it’s not the solution I’ve got a problem with,” Mac says. “If that’s what it takes for people to finally accept that I’m straight, then fine, I’ll bang a goddamned dude. I just don’t see why it has to be _you!_ ”

Dennis’s eyes narrow. “You seriously have a problem with it being me.”

“Yes!”

Dennis purses his lips, gives Mac a blistering once-over that leaves him feeling stripped raw. “Fine,” he says, with a haughty little scoff, a challenge in the making. “I’ll just have to prove myself to you.”

Mac rolls his eyes. “Oh, and how do you plan on doing that?”

Dennis’s brows twitch and he grins, like he can suck all the air and light out of the room, leaving Mac gasping and stumbling blind with one darkly alluring smirk. “You’ll find out, won’t you.”

Mac does not need to find out.

He throws his hands up in defeat and pulls off a fantastically dramatic storming out, locking himself in the relative safety of the back office—then he slumps into Frank’s chair, deflating like he’s been popped. Murmured chatter drifts in from under the door, but soon dissipates; Mac hears the doorbell in the distance, then nothing but a blissful, blanketing quiet. He leans back in the chair and shuts his eyes.

His heart’s still racing like a thoroughbred, and he wills it to calm down, breathing deep, thinking about anything else. It doesn’t help. Freshly irritated, he tosses his head against the seat.

 _You’ll find out, won’t you._ Mac really doesn’t need to find out, that’s something he can spend the rest of his life never knowing. Judging by the sudden rush of blood south, however (when Dennis first suggested it, when Dennis smirked at him, when his eyes shone like he wanted to devour Mac whole), he sure as hell _wants_ to know just how Dennis plans on seducing him.

And that’s only part of the problem. That’s the tip of the iceberg.

Dennis fucks someone. Dennis never calls. The last step in the time-honored system is _S – Separate_ _entirely_ , the Irish goodbye and the notch in the bedpost. Mac’s seen it happen a hundred times, observing with an objective appreciation the whole delicate process, worked into art by Dennis’s clever hands and tongue (Christ, there’s a visual he doesn’t need now, the addictive thought of Dennis’s clever hands and tongue). It could happen to anyone; it’s probably happened to half of Philly.

It could happen to him.

Mac imagines Dennis putting his voicemail on speaker for Mac to listen in, smug and gleefully grinning as some girl cries and curses him out over the phone. Then it’s him yelling into his phone, not crying but his voice is definitely breaking, Dennis on the other end laughing at him, high-pitched and triumphant. The thought makes his stomach twist and spin in a way he can’t blame tequila for.

Mac was never one of the smart kids, and he’ll give you that readily; he’s a badass and he knows how to survive and that’s always been enough. But even he’s not dumb enough to trade his friendship, a lifetime he’s spent cultivating and nurturing with Dennis, for a roll in the hay, and it really doesn’t matter what kinds of pressing questions it addresses or how much he might find the thought interesting. The familiar ghost of Catholic guilt ties a nice, neat bow of “absolutely not” around the entire package, makes it easier to say no to.

But not by very much. Not nearly by enough.

He bites the inside of his cheek, and when he lets go of the breath he was holding it’s shaky and rattles in his lungs. His skin is too tight and his bones are too loose. He tries deep breathing, counting to four and holding it before the release, and it doesn’t exactly help but it does make him feel a little more tired out.

His eyes are closed, and it’s quiet outside.

When he falls asleep, he dreams about Dennis, and _I – Inspiring hope_ , and Dennis’s wicked smile, teeth as bright as moonlight, as he crosses another name— _Mac_ —off a neverending list.

—

A shrill squawk startles Mac awake. Blinking, scrubbing at his eyes, he winces when Dee’s voice screeches again: “Mac! Hey, open up!”

The clock tells him he only slept for a few hours. He’s got a crick in his neck and his lower back twinges if he cocks his hip at the wrong angle. And with Dee piercing his eardrums from just outside the back office, Mac isn’t sure if waking up was the right thing to do.

When Dee starts banging her fist, and Charlie lends his voice to the incessant name calling, Mac finally rises and trudges to open the door, squints like Clint Eastwood at them. “What.”

“We were calling for you for like twenty minutes,” Dee says, twiggy hands perched on her hips.

“I _was_ sleeping.” Mac glances around the bar; it’s empty as ever, but four stools have been neatly arranged in a semicircle around a chair. “What’s going on?”

“Dennis has a thing he wants you to see,” Charlie says, jerking his head at the set-up. “Something to do you with you, and the whole banging experiment, he wasn’t really clear on it—”

“Kinda skimmed over a lot of details,” Dee adds, “he was doing a lot of serious drawing, he wouldn’t let us look—”

“But he was getting really into it,” Charlie finishes. “I think he’s pretty much done by now. Hey, Dennis?”

Dennis’s voice floats up from the basement. “Yeah?”

“You done down there, buddy?”

“Just putting the finishing touches on it!” Mac doesn’t know what to make of that, and judging by their equally puzzled expressions, neither do Charlie and Dee. They all pick a barstool and wait.

Dennis and Frank come up the basement stairs four minutes later, holding each end of a large poster board, covered in black cloth. “I’m telling you,” Frank is saying, “you got the angle all wrong—”

“I got the angle _just right_ , Frank, trust me. I’m exactly that flexible in real life.”

“You’re pushing forty, you couldn’t bend like that if your life depended on it.”

Dennis scoffs and balances the poster board on the chair, while Frank clambers onto the last remaining stool. “First off, thank you for coming,” Dennis says, grinning wide and cheery, a magician about to charm a skeptical audience. “I realize there’s been something of a miscommunication between all of us, in regards to a proposed experiment between myself and Mac.”

Mac snorts. That’s one way to put it. Beyond an arched eyebrow, Dennis doesn’t comment.

“So, in order to make myself absolutely clear, let me reiterate: yes, I crafted a plan in which I would have sex with Mac,” he gestures, of course, and Mac’s cheeks go Day-Glo pink, “in turn providing him with enough evidence to put to rest any and all arguments about his… alleged homosexuality.”

“Yeah. Definitely alleged,” Mac says. “It’s alleged as shit. It’s fucking annoying.”

(He thinks he hears Charlie mutter _I’ll say_ under his breath.)

Dee points a finger at him, then Mac. “So you bang him… straight?”

“All right, let’s put it this way.” Dennis faces Dee, hands on his hips. “Name something you don’t like.”

Dee considers the question, then makes a face. “I know I’m gonna catch shit for this,” she says, “but I'm gonna go with IPAs. They're all way bitter and they're overpriced as shit.”

At least someone knows their audience. “Are you crazy? IPAs are _delicious_ —”

“The bitterness is like the best _part_ about beer, how _dare_ you—”

“—and they have that nice, hoppy taste—”

“—they are _so_ not overpriced, have you ever had a _good_ IPA that was worth the price? It’s totally justified!”

Without breaking a sweat, Dee says, “Yeah, I’m not budging. IPAs are overrated and beer snobs can blow me.”

Dennis stretches his hands wide before the Gang, Moses parting the stormy sea. “All right, all right,” he says, “let’s all disregard her misguided opinions for a moment. Dee, tell us, how did you decide you didn’t like IPAs?”

Dee’s brow scrunches in confusion. “I tried one.”

“Exactly. _You tried one_. You tried an IPA and you _decided_ you didn’t like it,” Dennis says. “In Mac’s case, he’s going to _try_ having sex with a man—only if he doesn’t like it, he won’t turn into a snotty beer hipster with no taste.”

Charlie nods at the poster board. “What’s all that about then?”

Dennis grins. “Well, I’m glad you asked,” he says, and gives his wrist a single flick, and without another word the black cloth covering the poster board sweeps off with a flourish.

Right about that time is when Mac starts _really_ questioning if there is a God, because there’s no way He would have let Dennis draw what he did on any sort of surface, in any sort of medium, for any kind of audience.

God can score some points back if He smites Mac right this second.

Dee tilts her head. “Is that supposed to be you and Mac?” she asks.

“I think so,” Charlie says, pointing at the poster board. “That’s Mac’s feather tat, and he got that knee scar playing dodgeball one time in fifth grade—and I’m pretty sure those are Dennis’s weird balls, see—”

“So _that’s_ what those are. I just thought they were kumquats.”

“No, Dee, kumquats are kinda small? They look more like apricots if you ask me.”

“An apricot and a kumquat, how about that.”

“My balls are perfect, as is the rest of my body,” Dennis says, thin smile cut tight across his face. “Mac, I notice you haven’t said anything.”

The heavenly smiting was supposed to get to him first. Mac deliberately avoids locking eyes with Dennis, and nods halfheartedly at the drawing’s… everything. “I agree with Charlie,” he mumbles. “They look like apricots to me.”

“Not about my—no, Mac, about the drawing in _general_. There’s a reason I did it, you know.”

Of course there is. Clenching his jaw until it hurts, Mac glares at the drawing of himself, grinning like a simpleton, his pencil-drawn hands tight on paper Dennis’s smooth hips, Dennis’s gorgeous thighs crushed around Mac’s waist. Dennis at least had the good taste to leave the action partially obscured by shadow, but in all honesty, that just leaves it up to the imagination—and Mac’s imagination, coaxed to attention the instant the board was revealed, ran off with all the possibilities the drawing conjured up and has yet to be heard back from.

“How else to better illustrate the experiment,” Dennis says, standing tall and impossibly proud, “than to _illustrate_ the experiment. There are a number of reasons why I am the sole champion to herald this cause, many of which you can easily determine from this.”

He raps a knuckle on the poster board. “For example, the positioning—Mac is of course on the top, as I am a power bottom, but I am also capable of bending my legs back at _exactly_ that angle, providing Mac with the maximum amount of usable power. Also take into consideration our body types—Mac’s stockier build is the perfect counterpoint to my sleek, swimmerlike body, thus enabling speed to enter into the equation.”

Frank, Charlie, and Dee tilt their heads. “Huh.”

“We’re almost the same height, so the part where we line up and lock in is unaffected,” Dennis says, “and the dimensions of his penis, albeit an estimate on my part, should still be a near-perfect match for those of my more intimate areas.” He smiles like a conspiracy theorist with evidence to spare. “It’s pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.”

“So you’re like, legitimately, mathematically perfect for him,” Charlie says. “At least as far as banging goes. That’s kinda cool, I guess. In a way.”

“Well Charlie, I’m flattered; it’s rare when Lady Luck drops the perfect partner off on your doorstep,” Dennis says, and the flutter of a hand to his chest means he’s not talking about Mac. “I haven’t even factored in the part where I am already incredibly sexually experienced, have established a positive working relationship with Mac, am as of two weeks ago free and clean of all the more popular STIs—”

“And that’s why I don’t wanna do it,” Mac cuts in.

Frank casts a troubled look at him. “You’re not one of those bug chasers, are you?”

“What? No!” Aghast, Mac gestures to the drawing, flaps a helpless hand in its direction. “I just don’t want to have sex with Dennis!”

“Mac, I am perfect for this. Literally, I am. The picture should've made that obvious,” Dennis says brusquely. A tic is building in his jaw. “At this point you’re just being completely foolish.”

“I am not!”

“Then explain what possible reason you could have for not wanting to have sex with me,” Dennis says, and the curve of his one raised brow is skeptical as shit.

He’s frustrated, he’s feeling cornered; Mac is a feral dog boxed in by people with good intentions and bad ways of showing them. The Gang’s eyes are burning holes through his skin, he can feel it like a nasty itch. “It’s just gonna fuck everything up, bro, it always does. Sex makes things _weird_ and _emotional_ and you separate from chicks like entirely—it’ll make shit all weird with our friendship and it’s too much, Dennis! It’s too goddamn much!”

It tears out of him like a bullet. Silence wraps around it, suspends it in Matrix time. Dennis blinks at him. “That’s what you’re afraid of?” he says mildly. “That our friendship is gonna get _weird_?”

The bullet drops to the floor. Neo is unharmed.

“Isn’t it?” Mac says; Dennis only smiles. “You—you always leave chicks after you bang them.”

“Because I don’t want anything to do with them after that. I don’t _befriend_ these women,” Dennis says. “I don’t offer them a place to stay when they’re in dire need of an apartment, and then continue living with them for almost two decades. I don’t trade off doing laundry and buying groceries with them every other week. I don’t surprise them with Flyers tickets on their birthdays, I don’t share my Netflix account with them—Mac, I don’t do _shit_ with them.” He pauses. “Except bang them. But that’s it.”

“So this… isn’t based on the D.E.N.N.I.S. system,” Mac says, a hopeful note squeaking into his tone.

“It’s a break from my usual methods,” Dennis allows with a nod. “But that’s because I’m already friends with you, that’s not going to change. We could have sex a million times and our friendship would come through it completely unscathed. We could do missionary, doggystyle, cowgirl, _reverse_ cowgirl, go through all the greatest hits and you and I would still be best friends. Literally _nothing_ about that could ever change.”

Admittedly, Mac checks out on a mental vacation when Dennis starts listing positions (Dennis can do them all, he knows, he’s seen every tape). But when Dennis vows that _nothing_ can rock the foundations of their friendship, goddammit, it’s hope wriggling on the end of the line and Mac bites after it. Dennis has always known how to reel him in. “You’re sure of that.”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Swear it.”

Dennis arches a brow high in amusement. “If it makes you feel any better. I _swear_ that our friendship—”

“Swear it on the Charter,” Mac says, and Frank, Charlie, and Dee gasp quietly in unison.

Amusement, meet bemusement. “The Charter? Dude,” Dennis says. “I don’t even know if we _have_ that thing anymore.”

“It’s in the safe in the back office,” Frank says. “I put it there for safekeeping after I caught Cricket using it to break up an eighth.”

“Well, that’s… helpful, Frank, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not doing it.” Dennis schools his face into an imploring expression, blue eyes huge and disappointed, casts the full force of it on Mac. “Come on, man, this is getting a little ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“It’s ridiculous for me to care about our friendship?” Mac says. “It’s _ridiculous_ for me to worry that you’ll kick me out like one of your other conquests, when I’m like a million times more better than they are?”

“Someone’s confident.”

“It’s _ridiculous_ to worry that you’ll get all creepy and emotional after we bang—”

“Dude, who are you talking to?” Charlie says with an abortive laugh, flinging a hand out at Dennis. “You’re worried that _Dennis_ is gonna get emotional on you?”

“Well, I’m the one doing the banging, right?” He points emphatically to the poster board, and they all nod. “So that makes Dennis the girl here, and because I’ve _had_ sex with women before, I know that they get all… weird, and _clingy_ , and start talking about their _feelings_ , and—”

“ _Mac_.” Dennis smiles like a creature that’s not supposed to know how. “I shouldn’t have to point this out to you, but this is not a girl’s body. This is not a girl’s mind. _This_ ,” and his hand traces the shadows gathered between paper Dennis and paper Mac’s thighs, “is not a girl’s dick, or a girl’s asshole _taking_ a dick. The whole goddamn point of this is that I am not a girl, are we crystal fucking clear about that?”

Mac’s ears redden. “I was just saying.”

“In any case, the other reason I’m so cut out for this is because I will _never_ be clingy or emotional or want to talk about my feelings with you. Ever, Mac. I am your literal best option in this scenario, in fact I’m the _only_ option, how are you not getting this by now?”

Mac squirms around on his barstool. Not that he’s completely convinced of their friendship’s safety, but he’s more or less out of arguments to toss up. And truthfully, he doesn’t want to come up with more; Dennis is so insistent, and his eyes are so brilliant, and paper Mac’s face is so very rapturous… “I still want you to swear on the Charter,” he says.

Dennis rests his hands on his hips. “Seriously?” he says; Mac nods, and Dennis sighs. “Frank?”

“Yeah?”

“Go get the damn Charter.”

Paddy’s Charter is a quasi-ancient sheet of yellow legal paper with as many rules and regulations as Mac’s cramped handwriting could fit, while still leaving enough room for everyone to add fancy signatures on the bottom. “Still smells a bit funky,” Frank comments, as the Charter is set down gingerly on the bar counter. “Primo bud, though.”

“I’ll say,” Dee says, giving the Charter a curious sniff. “So, I guess Dennis just puts his hand on the thing and—”

With a grand roll of his eyes, Dennis carefully lowers his hand onto the Charter, right above the curling arabesques that spell out _Dennis F. Reynolds_. “Mac, listen to me and listen good. I’m going to stay friends—”

“No, you gotta do it right, it’s an official oath and shit,” Mac says, “this shit holds up in a court of law. ’I, Dennis Reynolds…’”

Annoyed, Dennis scowls. “I, Dennis Reynolds—” Mac nods readily at him, and he shakes his head, “—do solemnly swear to remain friends—”

“ _Best_ friends. Besides Charlie.”

“To remain _best_ friends with Mac, after the events of this experiment have come to pass, or face the consequences wrought by Paddy’s Charter. There. Witnessed by Mac, Frank, Charlie, and Dee, on this… whatever today’s date is. Thursday.”

“And you won’t turn into a girl on me after we do it?” Mac adds.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“ _Dennis_.”

“And I won’t turn into a girl on you after we do it, Jesus!” Dennis rips his hand from the Charter like it had burned him. “There. Your turn.”

“Wait, what?” Mac tears his gaze from the Charter in bewilderment. “What’s my turn?”

“Your turn to swear on the damned thing,” Dennis says. “If I have to do it, then so do you.”

“It’s only fair,” Dee adds; there may or may not be a smirk on her lips.

Mac glances to Charlie and Frank, a pleading look in his eye, but Charlie looks vaguely unsympathetic and Frank only says, “She’s got a point. All in or all out.”

“What, I, _fine_.” Mac’s fuming as he pats the Charter with more ferocity than any quasi-ancient sheet of legal paper should be patted. “I, Mac, say all the same shit Dennis did, or I will suffer the wrath of God _and_ the Charter together.” He dresses Dennis down with a stern look. “You forgot to give big ups to God, man. He’ll know if you didn’t.”

“However will I live with myself,” Dennis says.  

“Dunno, man, but I guess that’s it. This experiment is officially on,” Mac says. Rolling his eyes, Dennis crosses his arms and walks back to his drawing with Frank and Charlie in tow, starting up a discussion on the merits of speed versus strength. Dee’s curious smirk has yet to evaporate, however, and Mac glares at her. “What.”

“’Cause this is gonna go over real well. Like a lead zeppelin,” Dee says.

“We’re really more like Guns N’ Roses,” Mac says. “I’m Slash, though; Dennis is Axl Rose. We work together like that.”

“Oh—so you’re Slash, and my brother is Axl.” Dee’s smirk hardens. “Tell me, what happened to Guns N’ Roses again?”

Mac stills. He doesn’t have an answer for her, and it’s not because he doesn’t know.

“Yeah, I thought so. You boneheads enjoy your gay little rock show, all right.” Dee walks off to join in the now lively debate by the drawing, and Mac stands alone by the Charter.

 _It won’t be so bad. Dennis swore it wouldn’t change anything. We’ll do the experiment, I’ll prove I don’t like banging guys, and that’ll be that. All this shit will be_ over _. It’ll be over for_ good _._

Right, and Guns N’ Roses never broke up.

—

They decide on a date. Monday, because what’s more romantic —though Dennis stresses nothing of the sort can or will come of this. This is a simple, clinical exploration of two men’s bodies, designed to determine and assess sexual responsivity and—

And Mac’s whatever about it. It’s a Monday because the bar picks up from Thursday to Saturday, Mac said no to banging on the Lord’s Day, Wednesday is already ‘hump day’ and this is _not_ a laughing matter, and Tuesdays have always been kind of suspicious.

They decide on a date that Thursday, and then it’s Monday without any warning. Mac prays, and works, and practices karate, and no matter how hard he prays, or how diligently he works, or how awesomely he practices karate, it’s not enough to slow the passage of time: Monday sneaks up on him like a sucker punch.

And it’s a _lot_ harder to be whatever about it, he realizes numbly, when said whatever is only a couple of hours away. Mac stares down at his lime slices and his knife and his cutting board and takes another ginormous breath.

Monday. Today. After work. They’re gonna go home, they’re gonna get undressed, and then they’re gonna—

 _BANG_. Mac jumps. _BANG. BANG. BANG._

“Does he have to take care of the rats _now_ ,” he says, through gritted teeth.

“It’s Monday.” Frank doesn’t look up from his ledger. “Charlie always does the rats on Monday.”

_BANG, BANG._

“I would appreciate it if he could maybe do them _tomorrow_ ,” Mac says, in between _BANG_ s; it’s like someone’s slugged him in the chest and each _BANG_ is another direct hit. “You know. Change it up a bit?”

Frank’s quiet for an unnaturally long moment, enough for Mac to look up—Frank’s staring at him over the rims of his glasses, brows drawn down. He shuts the ledger and slides off the barstool. “I’ll go talk to him.”

A minute passes, and the strident sounds of slaughter stop. Baffled, Mac blinks. “Didn’t expect that.”

“Just better hope we’re as empty tomorrow night, too,” Dee says beside him as she works a persistent stain out of a glass, and Mac doesn’t really need anyone’s commentary, not ever but especially not now, and he whirls on her with his eyes blazing.

“And I don’t really need to hear the sounds of _rat skulls_ being caved in at the moment, okay? Could you give it a rest? We’ll just get Charlie to do it before we open or whatever. There. No big deal.”

To his surprise, Dee doesn’t fly into a rage. She doesn’t even flinch. She instead glances up from her glass, weirdly soft. “Sure,” she says, and that’s _all_ she says, no sarcasm, no barbs.

 _Sure_.

Charlie and Frank emerge from the basement. Frank walks back to his seat and his ledger, but Charlie slows down as he’s passing the bar, a brown-stained towel wrapped around the head of the rat stick. He looks at Mac, and offers something that looks unnervingly like a smile—an _apologetic_ one. “Sorry, man,” he says.

Mac blows up.

“All right, _what_ is going on here?” A shaky, accusatory finger points at Frank, Dee, and Charlie in turn.

Dee cocks her head. “What do you mean?”

“What do you _mean_ , ‘what do you mean’?” Mac bellows. “You! All of you!”

Charlie glances at Frank in search of an explanation. “I’m not following,” he says.

“You’re all being _nice_!” Apoplectic with rage, the whites of Mac’s eyes shine against his slowly purpling face. He wields the finger of righteous fury at Dee again. “You, you’re not being a shrill bitch and _you_ —” Frank’s eyebrows jump, “—actually asked Charlie to reschedule Charlie work, and hey, _speaking of Charlie_ —” Charlie jabs a thumb at himself in bewilderment, “— _you_ actually _apologized!_ For _being loud!_ Which you always _are!_ ”

Mac is a rampaging bull, breathing hard, nostrils flared. “Seriously, what the hell is going on?” he says, voice lower but no less belligerent. “Did Dennis put you up to this? Did he threaten you? Did he pay you all off? Or maybe he told you that his new _bitch_ ,” Mac spits out the word with more venom than even Dee gets, “is a delicate and sensitive _fairy_ who needs to be _coddled_ before the main event? Is that it? _Is that what he told you_?”

Dee stares at him, openly shocked. Charlie’s grip on the rat stick has tightened.

“Dennis didn’t tell us to do this,” Frank says.

Mac does a short double-take and his eyes widen. “Wait, what? No. He had to.”

Frank shakes his head. “Nope,” he says. “No threats, no flowers, no fairies.”

“Yeah, Dennis didn’t have _anything_ to do with this,” Charlie adds, eyes narrowing when Mac wheels around to face him—Mac realizes his fist is pulled back, ready to start throwing punches. He somewhat sheepishly lowers it.  

“We just—” Dee stops, and an out-of-place grimace works its way onto her face. “Look, we didn’t want you to stew in your own juices and freak out more than you usually do, okay? We know you and Dennis are gonna ‘experiment’ or whatever tonight—“ she does the finger quotes and all, Mac flinches without meaning to, “—and we didn’t want shit to get any weirder than it already is.”

“Which,” Frank says ruefully, slicing his hand in the air at Mac.

“Yeah, that went well.” Charlie bumps the rat stick against his palm and shrugs. “So much for that plan.”

“Can’t fault us for trying,” Dee agrees. “Try to stop a freak-out from happening, and what do you get.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Frank says with a snort, and they all go back to their own individual lives, and Mac is left standing at the corner of the bar, blood running hot and his brain scrambled to bits.

“I wasn’t freaking out,” he says. No one is listening.

Not even a minute later, Dennis emerges from the office, keys jangling in his hand.

“Guys?” Frank, Charlie, and Dee look up. “We’re gonna get going.” He heads over to Mac and leans in, lips quirked in a knowing grin. “Ready to go?”

Residual rage has Mac almost vaulting over the bar to get the hell away from these people. He’s fucking _glad_ to be alone with Dennis, who is familiar, who is scheming and calculating and manipulative and just _plain old Dennis_.

“Break a leg, you guys!” Dee calls out at their retreating backs, and Mac’s shoulders stiffen underneath his jacket. “Let us know how it goes!”

“I hate your sister, dude,” Mac tells Dennis, his cheeks burning with embarrassment.  

They get in the Range Rover. Mac’s calming down, slowly but surely enough. Dennis keys the ignition, then shifts to face Mac, slinging a friendly arm behind Mac’s headrest.

“Wanna pop your mix in today?” he asks. “I honestly won’t mind.”

Mac throws his head back and screams at the ceiling.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After suggesting a hypothesis and sketching out a prediction, our heroes come to the testing stage of the scientific method. If you know what I mean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. We earn our Explicit rating in this, and only this, chapter.  
> 2\. Condom Kingdom is a real sex shop in Philly, right on South Street. It's exactly how'd you imagine it to be.

They enter the apartment like two ghosts.

Mac is hyperaware of his movements as he steps around the coffee table, tosses his jacket on the couch, kicks his boots off. The door closes behind him with a _click_ ; he hears the metallic shift of deadbolts as Dennis turns the locks. His heart’s racing, and he listens to Dennis slip his high-tops off, fold his jacket over a chair in the kitchen, drop his keys on the table.

When he finally turns around, Dennis is looking at him like he expects Mac to say something.

And he does. “Dennis, I can’t do this.”

The disappointment isn’t as pronounced as Mac would’ve thought; Dennis’s gaze shutters, one side of his mouth pulled down.

And he doesn’t _say anything_ , so Mac has to continue, has to fill the poisonous well of space between them. “Look, I don’t really _need_ to experiment like this, you know? I can just _be_ straight like I always am and everything will be the same as it was before. And we’re good with that.” He stammers; his words tilt and trip over each other.

Dennis lifts his chin. “Are we?”

“What— _yeah_ , man, of course we—well, now that you _said_ it like that I guess we’re kinda not but it’ll all blow over anyway, won’t it?” He hesitates, half-laughing. “Right Dennis?”

Dennis measures out a slow, careful blink.

“C’mon, man, you’re stonewalling me here,” Mac says.

“Interesting choice of words,” Dennis says, raising an eyebrow; Mac doesn’t get what’s interesting about it but at least he’s not the only one speaking here, thank God. “And it won’t, Mac. Not anymore it won’t.”

“You—Dennis.” Mac huffs a weak laugh. “You don’t know that.”

“Don’t I?”

Mac hates when Dennis’s voice gets that low, otherworldly effect to it, where it’s all sharp cold knives underneath the softness. His insides shiver involuntarily. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re not a psychic, you know.”

“No, I’m not,” Dennis says, and he folds his arms across his chest. “But I am something else, Mac.”

Don’t say what, don’t say what, _don’t_ —“What?” Goddammit.

“Unafraid,” Dennis says.

Mac gapes at him. “Unaf—what—I’m _not afraid_ of _gay sex!_ ”

“ _Not_ gay sex,” Dennis says, with a hollow smile. “I’m not afraid of myself. See Mac, I am many things—a son, a brother. Proprietor of a bar. An Ivy League graduate.” He’s pacing the floor, occasionally flashing that smile at Mac. “A legend. A ladies’ man. A _golden god_. Mac, I am a great and powerful man—all things that could cause great envy and consternation in others. A weaker man, a lesser man would buckle. But as for me? These are all things,” he pauses, and spreads his hands wide, “for which I accept full responsibility.”

Mac stares at him. “What’s any of that got to do with gay sex?” he asks.

The façade drops like a rock. Dennis tilts his head, sharp crease to his brow signaling a deep bewilderment. “What, no, nothing,” he says. “That’s not even what this is about.”

“So what am I afraid of? Which I’m probably _not_ , anyway,” Mac says.

“You asshole, you’re afraid of _yourself_ , you’re afraid to—you know what, screw it. Screw it. I’m done.” Dennis offers another one of those manic smiles that don’t reach his eyes and holds his hands up. “If you wanna have sex tonight, you know where to find me. Otherwise, good _night_.” He vanishes into his bedroom almost immediately, the door snapping shut behind him.

Well. Mac cocks his head. That was easier to get out of than he’d thought—he runs through the several great, athletic scenarios he’d cooked up in the car on the way over.

It’s almost disappointing, not getting to use any of them.

He heads into his own room and sits on the edge of bed. Dennis’s words spin around his brain like a top, whirling and whirling.  “Not afraid, I’m not afraid,” he says.

No one but the many crucified Jesuses hears him.

“He’s not even, like, half the things he says he is,” Mac mutters. He falls back on the bed and for a while stares at yellowing cracks in the ceiling. “Seriously, he’s _not_.”

But he can’t stop thinking about it.

“He’s lying and faking it like the rest of us.” Mac crosses his arms across his chest, sticks his hands under his pits. “He just _acts_ like he’s not scared of shit. Literally, that is all that it is.”

Mac thinks about that for a moment, folds it over and over in his head like a worn piece of paper.

“He just acts like it,” he murmurs. The seed of an idea—all it is is just acting. All he needs to do is just act like he’s not afraid—of himself, he’s never been afraid of himself, Dennis doesn’t know _shit_ about him—and then Dennis will believe him.  Because it’s that easy, when you really get down to it. 

He’s got nothing to fear. Especially not himself. He isn’t afraid, he _knows_ who he is.

He’s still lying on the bed.

Mac closes his eyes, and the world fades away, an old tube TV dimming down with a soft buzz. He takes in a breath and holds it; exhales, feels it roll through him. He tells himself, he’s got nothing to fear, least of all himself, what he might find out. 

He doesn’t really think about his decision, he just acts. That’s what you do when you’re trying to be braver than you feel—you act without thinking, you rush headlong into the burning building.

Even if an arsonist is waiting for you inside.

—

Dennis didn’t lock the door, so Mac strides on in, dressed in nothing but boxers and an adrenaline rush of bravery. A tinny-speakered laptop is propped against Dennis’s skinny thighs, so Mac clears his throat.

“Dennis,” he announces, planting himself before the bed with his hands on his hips. “I’m ready.”

He gets Dennis’s attention but that’s it; Dennis remains perfectly silent. Not that Mac was expecting Dennis to tear his own clothes off and ravish him, but he was hoping for at least a little enthusiasm. All he gets is Dennis’s placid blink and the distorted voice of Phil Collins singing about coming in the air tonight.

“So, uh.” Mac shifts his weight from foot to foot. “Let’s go, or whatever. Let’s do it.”

“’Let’s do it’? Well, then.” Dennis sucks in his cheeks, twitches his brows in amusement. “You’re ready.”

Mac gestures down his mostly-naked body. “Um, duh?” he says. “Or did a total stranger just walk through your door in his underwear?”

Dennis’s lips twist into a lecherous grin. “Yeah, that definitely happened,” he says, and his gaze again searches Mac’s body, this time lingering on its target. Mac’s cheeks flush, and he fights the urge to cover himself.

He nods his head at Dennis. “Aren’t you gonna get undressed?” he says, but Dennis holds up a finger. “Dude, what—”

“Just until the drum break,” Dennis says, pointing at the laptop. “Really gets you right in the zone.”

“Dude, come on,” Mac says, “isn’t this kinda more important than Phil Collins? Like, of _all_ people?”

“You don’t have to be insulting about it,” Dennis says. “I mean _sure_ , okay, his solo career’s more commercial when you compare it to the work he did in a group, but—”

“Dude, don’t— “ Dennis stops, looks up. “Bateman, dude. Really creepy.”

Dennis scowls, but it’s more mischievous than menacing. “Fine. No Phil Collins,” he says. “But hey, while we’re on the subject. I’m feeling generous, so I’ll let you pick the music for tonight.”

Mac claps his hands together and lights up immediately. “Red Hot Chili Peppers!”

“Ah, no.”

Mac is visibly baffled. “But they’re like, the sexiest music ever,” he says.

Dennis grimaces. “Pick something else.”

“Oh. Uh. Nirvana?”

“Something _else,_ Mac.”

Dejected, Mac curls his lip. “Do I get any choices, at least?” he asks; Dennis spins his laptop around and Mac scrolls through Dennis’s music library with a growing sense of dismay. “You’ve got, like, _nothing_ good here.”

Dennis sniffs. “You know, if you’re going to shit all over my sex playlists then maybe we should just not do music, how about that?” he says. He takes the laptop back and snaps it shut, like no music is a punishment for bad behavior.

“Your sex playlists are gay, dude,” Mac mutters.

“Well,” Dennis says, “that’s pretty appropriate, then, isn’t it.”

Mac freezes. Dennis goes tense immediately.

“Look. Mac.” He holds his hands out like Mac’s about to bolt, which isn’t too far off base, and his voice is soft as gossamer.  “Honestly, we should do this without music anyway. It’s just an experiment, right? We don’t need mood for an experiment, I mean. It’s not like I’m _seducing_ you.”

These are absolutely the wrong things to say and Mac takes a gargantuan step backwards.

Dennis sighs, stops advancing. “Bro, listen, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can go back to being straight or whatever, okay?”

“You promise you’re not seducing me.” Mac points accusingly at the laptop. “No gay mood music?”

“No gay mood music,” Dennis promises him readily. “No straight mood music, either. No Phil Collins, no Nirvana. Nothing but us, buddy.”

Mac takes a deep breath, but remains in Dennis’s bedroom, meets his eyes. “That’s. Good, then.”

“Good.” Dennis lets out a breath of his own, and shifts his weight from foot to foot. He’s standing fully-clothed in front of Mac, barefoot and in a worn blue T-shirt and black sweatpants; he rubs the back of his neck absently, tousling the soft curl of hair at the nape. “And here I thought I’d be the underdressed one,” he says.

Mac takes a tentative step closer. “Are you gonna—I mean, should I have—”

Dennis shakes his head. Then he catches Mac’s gaze, holds it, more solemn than Mac’s ever seen him before. “You ready?”

It’s a question for the ages. He certainly doesn’t _feel_ ready, and even if he did he’s not sure he’d recognize what being _ready_ felt like. “I guess,” he says instead.  

“That’s not gonna be enough,” Dennis says. “Mac. Are you _ready_?”

“I don’t—“ Mac stops, refocuses. “Dude, honestly, if I _don’t_ do this, it’s gonna keep eating at me and I just—I want it to be done, you know? Get it over with already. Then I don’t have to think about it ever again if I don’t want to.”

Dennis nods, the words sinking in. “That’s as good a reason as any,” he says, and Mac flushes pink—faint praise is praise nonetheless, and Mac knows enough to snatch up any traces of it from Dennis that he can. At any rate, it’s an encouragement, and he’ll take all the encouragement he can get his hands on.

“So, uh.” Mac chuckles; it’s stiff and awkward. “You gonna undress sometime this evening?”

Dennis considers him for a moment. “Actually, come here,” he says.

Mac’s already a foot closer, heart thumping. “What? Why?”

“Well it’s your night, isn’t it?” Dennis offers him a grin. “Care to do the honors?”

“Of—you mean stripping your clothes off?”

Dennis shrugs. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” he says, and that’s true, at least. And Dennis doesn’t _seem_ to be playing at anything—he’s still grinning but it’s open, honest.  

Mac shrugs lightly and tugs Dennis’s T-shirt off.

“ _Mac!_ ” Dennis says, primly offended. “Some _finesse_ , if you don’t mind.”

“Dunno what that is,” Mac says, drinking in the planes of Dennis’s pecs, the thin definition of abdominal muscle, the twin creases of bone that slope toward his thighs. He swallows, and says, “You’re pale as shit, man.”

“I _know_ that,” Dennis says, with an irritable flare of his nostrils. “You know what, it’s fine, I’ll just—” His hands fly to the waist of his sweatpants.

“No, man, I got that—”

“I _know_ how to take my clothes off, _Mac_ —”

“It’s _my night_ , so why don’t you just—” Mac loses his balance and lands squarely on his ass. Even with his sweatpants around his ankles, Dennis has the upper hand, bursting into open peals of laughter.

“You’re a _dick_ , Dennis,” Mac says, trying not to pout, disappointed that that’s the best he could come up with on short notice. Dennis is still laughing when he yanks Mac off the floor, and he finishes kicking his sweatpants off with a joyful kind of smile.

And they’re down to their underwear. It’s impossible to ignore—Dennis is before Mac in navy boxer-briefs and Mac is before Dennis in red Phillies boxers and his stomach is suddenly in knots and Mac can hear the blood pounding in between his ears. Dennis is so close to him, he has to hear it too, like listening for the ocean in a conch shell.

An ocean is about to swallow him whole, and Mac wonders if maybe the conch shell never felt at home on the beach in the first place.

He glances down, needing the distraction, and his eyes widen with surprise. “You’re not hard,” he says.

Dennis cocks an eyebrow at him.“That’s because we haven’t done anything,” he says. “Why, are you?”

“I mean.“ Mac shifts a little, considering it. Sure his nerves are live exposed wires, but running somewhere beneath the tangle is a current of sheer _anticipation_ , crackling hot to life, an electrical pulse humming just under his skin. “Like, I could be? I’m just not there yet. Stimulation-wise.”

“Mm.”

“So.” Mac draws it out a little, meets Dennis’s unamused expression with his own, tentatively eager one. “Maybe we should, you know. Do something stimulating.”

The unamusement melts into the thin beginnings of a smile. “Did you have anything in mind?”

“Well, when I’m with a girl I usually like to start with kissing, and I mean like _just_ kissing, and nothing else, ‘cause like, it really builds up the tension? And I’m into that? So—”

“Ah.” Dennis holds a finger up, dangerously close to Mac’s mouth. “We’re not doing kissing.”

Mac’s face falls. “But—I _like_ kissing,” he says.

“Trust me on this one,” Dennis says with a knowing smirk. “What I’ve got in mind is gonna feel way better than kissing.”

“I don’t know, Dennis, but unless you’re gonna suggest _other_ kinds of mouth stuff, I’m really in the mood for—“ He stops, and his eyes shutter shut. “You’re touching my dick through my underwear.”

“So I am,” Dennis says, with quiet delight. “Isn’t that interesting.”

“Dennis, it’s a _handjob_ ,” Mac complains, “handjobs are _boring_ ,” as Dennis’s deft fingertips trace the soft curve of his cock. Even so, his breath catches in his throat.

“It’s not a handjob,” Dennis says with an impatient huff. “Technically speaking, anyway. I’m just feeling you out.”

“Feeling me out.” It sounds like the most ridiculous proposition Dennis has ever come up with.

“Yeah. Getting a feel for the job.” He glances at Mac’s shoulder, where his other, unoccupied thumb is gently sweeping a path from Mac’s neck to his arm. “Never realized how many you had here.”

“The freckles?” Dennis hums. “Mrs. Kelly used to say freckles were angel kisses. When we, um. When we were little.” He shudders, eyes still shut. “Could you, um.”

“Hm?”

Mac swallows. “More pressure?” he says, swaying, breathing harshly as Dennis’s thumb sweeps over his bobbing Adam’s apple.

“Here?” Dennis asks; Mac can hear the smirk in his tone. The heel of his palm rubs against the head; despite himself, low in his throat, Mac groans, and his cock twitches, thickens with blood. “Like that?”

“Don’t— _nnh._ ”

He can feel Dennis’s laugh against his skin, and he opens his eyes; Dennis is watching him with quiet excitement, lower lip caught between his teeth.

He glances down and suddenly startles. “Dude, you’re _still_ not hard?” he says, betrayed by the apparent lack of interest; Dennis just stares at him, wildly perplexed. “How come this is turning me on and not you?”

Dennis’s mouth curls into a pronounced frown. “I’m _controlling_ myself,” he says testily—not that Mac feels any better about it. “See?” Briefly, Mac watches as Dennis’s underwear tents, then relaxes.

“Why?”

“Why?” Dennis says with some incredulity. “Because—because! I don’t have to explain myself to you!”

Still, it’s not like Mac wants to be jerked off by a guy who isn’t even into it. “Why don’t you just—not?”

“ _Not_ control myself,” Dennis says, like Mac’s just asked him to cut off his own head. Mac shrugs, and Dennis’s eyeroll is more pointed than usual, but he resumes stroking Mac’s cock through his boxers, harder than before. And then, despite Dennis’s reluctant scowl, his boxer-briefs finally begin to tent.

“There we go,” Mac says, grinning brightly. “See dude, isn’t that like way better?”

The scowl deepens, and Dennis snatches Mac’s wrist without any warning. He practically slams Mac’s hand onto his dick. “Is it?” he hisses, but Mac’s too busy registering _his hand on Dennis’s cock_ to give much of an answer. Mac gapes for a few staticky moments; then Dennis nudges his palm and Mac presses back like a reflex. He actually feels Dennis’s cock twitch in his grasp, and something dark and hot and _wanting_ shoots hard through his veins.

Dennis bites his lip hard and drops his other hand to the small of Mac’s back. Then he pushes them together. He leans in close enough for the tip of his nose to just brush past Mac’s; his breath ghosts across Mac’s lips, his chin. Dennis’s erection is now unmistakable, well past the point of any of Dennis’s Jedi mind tricks—and most important of all, pressing insistently against Mac’s dick.

“What about this?” he says. “This better for you too?”

“I, I don’t—” Mac shudders hard. Dennis has worked out a rhythm, grinding up and down in long strokes. He slips his hand from between them and trails it around to Mac’s ass, gripping it tightly to pull them closer. “Kinda.”

“Hmph.” Clearly Dennis is not pleased with a mere _kinda_ , though in Mac’s defense his mind’s gotten foggy, searching for intelligent thoughts in a heavy, warm haze. Before Mac can protest, Dennis jerks Mac’s underwear down, then strips his own off. He makes a big show of licking his palm, staring directly into Mac’s eyes, and then they’re skin-to-skin and Mac almost swallows his tongue.

“ _Ohfuck_ ,” he says throatily, and squeezes his eyes shut. Dennis’s long fingers wrap around their cocks and stroke, slow to the base, smoothly back up.

“Not too long, but definitely thick,” Dennis husks, close to Mac’s ear. “Just how I like it.”

Mac’s cock jumps in Dennis’s hand. “You—you like it?”

“Yeah,” Dennis tells him, and his eyelashes flutter next to Mac’s cheek. “You like mine, don’t you?”

“Don’t— _nngh_ —make me answer that.”

“Think your body’s doing most of the answering, anyway,” Dennis says, in a voice like satin. The apples of his cheeks are flushed red, and his eyes are intensely bright, and the tip of his tongue darts out to wet his lips. “Yeah?”

Mac feels a tightening underneath his belly, and he breathes out deeply through his nose. Dennis’s hand slides smoothly over their cocks. “Yeah,” he rasps, “ _Dennis_.”

Dennis snickers. “Sounds like someone’s ready to roll,” he says, thumb sweeping in whorls against the head of Mac’s dick, an intense pleasure just scraping the edge of pain. Mac’s neck heats, the flush escapes to race down his bare chest; when he finally nods, he’s shaking.

“Good,” Dennis says, whisper-soft. He glances up. “Condom?”

“No thanks,” Mac says, thrusting lazily into Dennis’s hand. “I’m good.”

“I _beg_ your pardon?”

The next few seconds suck, no contest—Dennis pulls his hand away and takes a step back and gives Mac the most _incredulous_ stare. “What?” Mac says. “It’s not like you’re gonna get pregnant.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not using protection,” Dennis says, brows skyrocketing towards his hairline. “Dude, when was the last time you got tested?”

Because what he _really_ wants to think about now is sitting in the waiting room of a shitty free clinic when he could have Dennis’s hands on him again. “I’m clean,” he says instead. It’s an educated guess, technically speaking; he hasn’t done anything with anyone in a while.

Dennis should know that, at any rate.

“And on the off-chance that you’re _not_ ,” Dennis says, snatching his wallet from his dresser. A single second of searching yields a slightly bruised foil. “Put it on.”

“Dennis, come _on_ ,” Mac says, resisting the urge to stomp his foot. “Your mom didn’t make me wear one.”

Mac’s never seen eyes bug out to literal cartoonish proportions before, until now. “ _What_.”

“Yeah,” Mac says, “I mean, at first she wanted me to? But I was like, ‘I’m sorry Mrs. Reynolds, but condoms are technically a sin,’ and she was all, ‘Whatever, I had a partial hysterectomy anyway,’ so we just ended up… not.”

Dennis blanches. “Jesus Christ,” he says.

“Yeah,” Mac agrees. “Felt awesome, though.”

Mouth working wordlessly, Dennis stares at Mac for a solid ten seconds. He finally remembers how to breathe, and the finger he thrusts at Mac barely even trembles. “Okay, how about this,” he says. “If you don’t wanna wear a condom, that’s fine, but _you’re_ the one sleeping in the wet spot.”

Mac grimaces. “There’s a wet spot?”

“Yes.”

“Even when it’s just dudes?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Dennis says, exasperated, “but only _if_ you don’t wear a condom.”

Mac frowns. “I hate condoms,” he mumbles.

“Yeah, we all do,” Dennis says, and shakes the foil at Mac again; reluctantly, Mac takes it. “You at least know how to put it on, right?”

“ _Yes_ , Dennis,” Mac says. He stares at the condom like it’s personally offended him.

“Right. Now then,” Dennis says, sitting on the bed with his hands on his knees. He exhales deeply, and looks at Mac. “We doing this, or…?”

“Guess so,” Mac says, still sort of pouting, but Dennis is scooting backwards, rearranging himself on the bed, grabbing a pillow and stuffing it beneath his hips. It’s all perfectly planned, precise and efficient, and Mac finds himself watching with increasing interest.

He must’ve been watching for _too_ long, because Dennis snaps at him with an impatient, “Well?”

Mac startles with a short jolt, and with a small shake clambers onto the bed. Dennis has his legs parted and—Mac’s eyes go round as saucers. “You _bleach_?”

“For this? Yes,” Dennis says tartly. “Now hurry up.”

“Right. Okay.” Mac claps his hands and points them at Dennis. “Lube. Do we have that? ‘Cause we’re gonna need like a shitload of it, I am _not_ kidding.”

Dennis arches an eyebrow. “Someone’s done this before.”

“Uh, yeah, with Carmen?” Mac says, like it should have been obvious. “I mean, we tried it once with me going in dry and it was _totally_ not cool, okay, my dick was chafed to shit, and—”

Dennis holds up a hand, nose wrinkling. “Don’t really need the visual,” he says, and nods off at his dresser. “Black plastic bag.”

Mac jumps off the bed and, seconds later, pulls out an incredibly _large_ bottle of lubricant. “Dude, where’d you go for this?”

“Condom Kingdom.”

“ _Dude!_ ” Mac whirls around. “You went to Condom Kingdom and you didn’t tell me?!”

Dennis rolls his eyes. “Because I was really going to tell you that I went out and bought the _biggest bottle of water-based lubricant_ I could find in preparation for tonight,” he says. “You would’ve gotten scared and run off—you almost did, might I remind you.”

Mac bristles. “Yeah, but,” he says. “I didn’t. So.”

“Well, good for you,” Dennis says, thoroughly unimpressed. He sinks back into the pillow. “Look, you ready yet? I’m down to like half-hard over here.”

“Yeah, fine, one second,” Mac mutters—he’s still sore about missing out on a trip to Condom Kingdom, but he climbs back on the bed and settles between Dennis’s spread legs. And then reality crashes into him like a speeding car. “Um.”

Dennis narrows his eyes. “You _have_ done this before, right?” he says, voice full of suspicion. “With Carmen?”

“Yeah, but.” Mac falters. His grip on the bottle of lubricant is clammy. “She was a girl.”

“With a penis.”

“I mean, yeah, but—”

“Then it’s exactly the same plumbing-wise,” Dennis says. Goddammit, he looks like he could pity Mac. “Do you just want me to do it?”

“You’re clean, right?” Mac says. “I mean. Plumbing-wise.”

Dennis simply stares at him, lips pressed together for a long, dry moment. “Yeah.”

“Like, clean-clean? Like one hundred percent clean?”

“ _Yes_ , Mac. One hundred percent. One hundred and _ten_ percent.”

“I don’t mean like diseases and stuff, I’m also talking about—you know.” Mac swallows. Is it possible to still back out, or would Dennis never let him live it down? Would he even be able to live with himself? “Things, and stuff.”

“Mac, I haven’t eaten solid food for the past three days,” Dennis says, a hint of frustration coloring his tone. “Trust me. I am _literally_ as clean as you could possibly get down there.”

“Dude. That’s.” Mac stops, stunned. “That’s pretty bad, Dennis.”

“It’s fine.”

“No dude, I’m serious, your electrolyte levels can get way messed up, and your body’s gonna start eating all your muscles—we could run out to Wawa, they’re still open—”

“I _said_ ,” Dennis grits, blue eyes blazing, “it’s _fine_ , so will you please, _please_ , I am literally _begging you_ right now, stop dicking around on me already?”

Mac meets Dennis’s eyes, full of steel and determination, and makes a point of flicking the cap open. He slicks up a finger and sets the bottle down, then—

He takes a deep breath. Exhales softly. “Here goes,” he says.

Dennis only really flinches a little, but Mac stops immediately. “You okay?”

Dennis squirms around Mac’s finger. “Yep.”

“You sure?”

“I’ve had worse prostate exams,” Dennis says. “Just, you know.”

Mac nods, and a sympathetic twinge plucks at him, somewhere deep in his chest. “Reality checking in.”

Stone-faced, Dennis nods, and wriggles again. “Hey, you gonna move or—?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mac says hurriedly, sliding in, then out. In and out again, crooking his finger on the in-stroke. It’s easier to focus if this is all he thinks about, if he doesn’t give much thought to the cosmically unbelievable idea that he’s _inside of Dennis_ , that he’s now trying actively to turn him on. “Do you—do you like it?”

“What, getting fingered?” Dennis considers it, shifts on the bed. “If you’re doing it right, I guess.”

“Am I doing it right?”

Dennis frowns. “You know what, Mac? No,” he says. “You’re doing it all wrong.”

A cloud of bewilderment fogs over Mac’s features. “Dennis, what _other_ way is there to do it?”

That’s when Dennis smirks, and his eyes flash with pure mischief. “Use two fingers,” he says. “Or better yet. Use _three_.”

“Well yeah, I was getting to that, but Carmen says you gotta start with one, then two, then—hey!” Mac’s hand is batted away, as Dennis, three fingers shiny with spit, takes over.

“Like this,” he murmurs, lower lip between his teeth. “See.”

Fully transfixed, Mac watches Dennis smoothly plunge three fingers into his hole, then out. There’s a sharp hitch of breath, then a low, liquid moan, rippling through him, long eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks. Dennis opens his eyes and grins, all sharp and devilish charm, and Mac is rapt at attention, in more ways than one.

“Just watch me, babe,” Dennis purrs. “That all right?”

“You’ve—have you been practicing?” Mac’s throat is tight, a thousand rubber bands constricting his words at the core. “Have _you_ done this before?”

“I’m familiar with the lay of the land, if that’s what you mean.” Dennis works his hand in and out. Mac’s cock throbs, and unconsciously he moves his hand to cover it, squeezing, fingertips ghosting under the shaft. His thighs tense, shifting, spreading out; Dennis hums in approval, watching Mac beneath hooded lids. Snake charmers have nothing on Dennis Reynolds, and Mac’s never been more entranced in his life.

“When do you want me to, uh.” Mac jerks his head, and his throat works, tight and dry.

“Whenever you want, man,” Dennis says. His unoccupied hand fists his cock, almost an afterthought. “Ready when you are.”

“If I don’t do it now, dunno if I ever will,” Mac says, feeling like his entire body’s tight with anticipation. He eyes the way Dennis’s muscles ripple under his skin and swallows audibly. “So uh. Guess I should.”

Beneath shadowed lids, in a voice as quiet as night, Dennis says, “Guess you should.” Mac nods to himself, and breathes in.

The condom goes on after a few slippery tries—thankfully Dennis doesn’t comment. Mac practically drenches himself in lube, muttering a half-assed apology about getting it on the sheets. He shuffles closer between Dennis’s parted thighs, gripping his cock until the head just barely brushes against Dennis’s hole.

Focus, he has to focus. He catches Dennis’s gaze, holds it. “You with me on this?” he asks.

Mac expects something snide, something patronizing. What he gets instead is a short nod, and a solemn “Yeah, man, of course,” and it’s just enough of a boost to his confidence that he can successfully—

Nope. Nope. Not gonna work. Outmanned and out of his depth, Mac retreats with his heart pounding out loud. “Sonofa _bitch_.”

Dennis struggles to sit up as alarm flashes over his face. “What? Mac, what?”

Mac snatches the bottle of lube from the bedspread and uncaps it with unsteady hands. “Den, you are tight as _shit._ ”

Dennis leans back on his elbows. “It’s _supposed_ to be tight,” he says, somewhat distressed. “You’re not throwing a hot dog down a hallway here.”

Mac tries again and chomps down on his lower lip, eyes squeezing shut. “Jesus _Christ_ ,” he chokes, “ _dude_.”

“Stay with me, Mac,” Dennis says. He does this awkward shimmy closer and pets Mac’s arm like he’s a spooked horse. “You gotta give it a second.”

“I do _not_ remember Carmen being this tight.” He’s panting, even as Dennis lays back down. “Do girls have bigger buttholes than guys do?”

“Real sexy talk, man.”

“Yeah, well, _you_ try coming up with shit to say when you’re three seconds away from blowing your load,” Mac says, voice squeaking in all the wrong places. Deep breaths, deep breaths; he clenches and unclenches his thigh muscles and tries to think about literally _anything_ besides being inside Dennis’s ass.

And Dennis, goddammit, Dennis is biting his lip, struggling to keep a laugh from bubbling to the surface. “You’re serious, dude,” he says. “You’re about to blow your load.”

“Well I’m _trying_ not to.”

Dennis snickers. “How old are you, twelve? Jesus Christ, man,” he says. “You can’t even last a full _minute_? Mac, that’s—that’s just beyond sad. That is disappointing. That is _dismal_.“

“I can too last a minute! I can last a _shitload_ of minutes!” Mac yells, over the horrible noise that is Dennis cackling at him. “It’s not _my_ fault you’re like one of those—those—the finger toy things, man!”

“Chinese finger-traps?”

“ _Yeah!_ You’re like that!” Dennis smirks and cocks an eyebrow. “Now what?”

“You come yet?”

“ _No!_ Jesus Christ, I—wait. No,” Mac says. He looks down in surprise. Actually, he’s somehow worked himself in even further. “What the shit, man?”

A light shrug. “Distractions work, dude,” Dennis says. “But for the rest of the ride, _go slowly_.”

“Fuckin’ show _you_ slowly,” Mac mutters, glancing back down, this time with a more pinpointed focus.  It takes a Herculean effort, both to inch his way in and not to let the sudden crazy tight heat get to him, and for a dark traitorous second he’s sorta grateful the condom’s on or he would’ve blown his load two seconds into the game and Dennis would’ve laughed at him for literally the rest of his life.  

But he bottoms out, what seems like hours later. The clock tells him it’s been a minute. He looks up with a broad grin on his face and says, “Dennis, hey! I did it! I—Dennis?”

“Yes Mac?”

Mac’s grin falters. “You okay?”

“Of _course_ I’m okay,” Dennis snaps. He’s got the sheets balled up in his fists; Mac’s eyes widen with sudden worry. Carmen told him something about _tearing_ , one time, gory as a high school sex ed presentation. Mac’s never been able to forget about it.

“I’m not hurting you, am I?” he says.

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” Dennis tells him, squarely annoyed. Mac remains motionless, however, until the cords of muscle in Dennis’s arms finally relax. He waits until Dennis is breathing normally. Then he leans in closer.

“I’m all the way inside you, Dennis,” he says, because that’s still pretty important, and he wasn’t sure if Dennis was paying attention.

“ _Really_ , now. God, I _couldn’t tell_.”

“Yeah, I’m surprised I could fit it all in, to be honest,” Mac says blithely. He fidgets a little bit. “I’m gonna pull out now. Not all the way, though, ‘cause I feel like that’s going back to square one, and…” He trails off. “Yeah. I’ll just… do that.”

Out’s a little easier, a little faster. Mac’s spine tingles with a full-bodied shiver and it’s almost too much to work with, like he never knew he could feel that _intensely good_ before. All this pleasure’s concentrated like a white hot spotlight just below his belly, and he takes a moment to roll in it like a dog in dirt. “Dude,” he says, newly reverent, “what’s it feel like?”

“Are you serious right now?”

“Yeah.” He shifts, rotates the head still inside Dennis’s hole. “C’mon, man, tell me.”

Dennis scowls up at him. “Like taking a reverse shit, is that what you wanna hear?” he says.

“With my dick in your ass? Uh, no.” Mac thinks about it, though. If it’s half as good for Dennis as it is for him… “That doesn’t sound too bad, honestly.”

“It gets _better_ if you’d actually start _fucking_ me,” Dennis tells him, growling.

“You think I can go faster this time? ‘Cause I think I’ve got the hang of it, and I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna bust in like the next few minutes.” Dennis’s stare is practically murderous, so Mac says, “Yep, okay, taking that as a yes,” and then stops questioning anything.

Another smooth stroke. After the initial insane stimulation, fuck, it really _does_ feel awesome—better than Carmen because it’s Dennis underneath him, Dennis literally surrounding him, hot and tight and he never really knew how _good_ Dennis was at this but he could always kind of guess, and it’s nice to blow past your expectations every now and then.

“You know,” Mac thinks aloud, “I think I’m really getting used to this whole thing—I feel like I’m generating all this _power_ , you know? And you’re taking it, which is really cool, and—Dennis?” He glances down.  “What’s wrong?”

Dennis has one arm flung over his eyes like a fainted Southern belle. “Dear God, you talk during sex _too_ ,” he mumbles.

“You don’t seem like you’re that into it.” Mac slows his pace to a crawl and ducks his head closer. “Want me to change positions? I’d be down for that.”

“No, Mac, shut up, it’s—never mind,” Dennis says. “Hurry up and finish, would you?”

 “Oh! Am I not hitting your G-spot?”

“My _what_?”

“Your G-spot—Carmen told me about it. I mean it wasn’t called that, it was something else, but like I hit it once on accident and—dude, it was so amazing, she went _totally_ nuts for it and—wait, okay, tell me if this works.” Mac starts to worm around, trying to change the angle of his thrust.

Dennis, at least, removes the arm from his eyes; his face is the image of a total mental collapse. “Guys don’t _have_ —what the hell are you doing?”

“Trying to hit your G-spot,” Mac explains. He thrusts in again. “That work?”

“No—Mac, Jesus— _here_ ,” Dennis says irritably. His hand slips around to Mac’s back and forces him closer; then Dennis’s long legs wrap around Mac’s hips. “Go like that,” he instructs.

It takes a moment for the words to sink in, because suddenly Dennis is _right there_ , way closer than he was before; his cock is hard and swollen hot underneath Mac’s abdomen, and Mac is forced onto his forearms, basically inches away from Dennis’s face. “Like this?” he says.

Face beading with sweat, and breathing harder than usual, Dennis nods. “Just like this,” he says.

“Okay.” Mac curves his hips forward, and he catches it: Dennis’s eyelids fluttering, the quick hitch of breath. “It worked?”

Dennis nods again, mouth half-cracked open over a moan. “Felt like it,” he says, and Mac squirms even closer, barely even blinking. Sweat is running in rivulets down his back, and he’s panting in short, sharp breaths, and Dennis has never, ever looked at him this way before.

Mac thrusts his hips in again, reconfiguring a rhythm. Smooth out, short in. He’s used to the heat but never quite the pressure, and when he hits whatever he’s supposed to be hitting Dennis tightens around him, and then his belly tightens back; Dennis groans like he’s just been hit and his thighs twitch around Mac’s waist and Mac has to shut his eyes and twist at the sheets that much harder, white-knuckling his way to focus. “God _dammit_.”

Dennis’s chuckle is more of a huff. “Getting there yet?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” Mac says thickly, thrusting in extra-hard for that. Dennis’s eyes flutter shut and he bites his lip.

“I’m not, man,” Dennis whispers. He bumps his hips up against Mac’s belly and then noses at him, humming softly in his throat. “Me too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dennis says, “close.” His face is flushed red, and his eyes are luminous, and his voice is an invitation. “Some experiment, huh.”

Experiment. Christ. Mac drops his head, brushing against Dennis’s nose again. “I almost forgot we were experimenting,” he says.

“That’s ‘cause you’re such a natural at this,” Dennis tells him, and a powerful wave of frission sweeps Mac clean, leaves him reeling.

“Really? Serious?”

A quirk of flushed red lips. “Sure,” Dennis says, “why not?”

Shuddering, Mac presses their foreheads together, closing his eyes as colors swim behind his lids. His hips work smoothly in, out, in. “Can you still sorta tell me what to do?” he murmurs, next to Dennis’s flickering grin. “Just wanna make sure I’m experimenting right.”

Dennis shivers, nods. “Keep this up and I’m done for.”

“But in a good way.” That he can work with; Mac regulates his pace to a perfect rhythm.

“Heh. Yeah,” Dennis says, then groans softly, shutting his eyes again. “ _Fuck_.”

Mac’s hypnotized. Every piece and particle of concentration willingly shifts gear; everything brightens with new determination. Dennis’s brows are pulled and bunched together, and his hand is gripping Mac’s hip, short nails digging into the skin. Every low groan he can discover feels like a personal victory, and every time Dennis shivers and twitches Mac’s focus just gets that much sharper, more single-minded. He flirts with the idea of jerking Dennis off now; something tells him to wait.

Then Dennis’s eyes fly wide open. He curses under his breath, twists at the sheets, yanking them close. But that doesn’t catch Mac’s attention nearly as much as Dennis’s lips, shiny-wet and pink and formed around a moan stuck in the back of his throat. Mesmerized, not really thinking, his hips working urgently between Dennis’s thighs: Mac kisses him as hard as he can.

The world outside them slows to a damned crawl, and then like a gunshot it’s brutal and fast and over.

With his lips still swollen hot like a thousand bee stings, Mac presses their foreheads together again. Dennis has this blown-out look, like he’s swinging hard between shock and single-minded arousal. “Let go, man,” Mac mutters, “c’mon,” and he slips a hand between them and _then_ Dennis’s legs tighten around his hips, Dennis hisses a sharp “oh _fuck_ ” as Mac works his hand up and down. “Fuck, _Dennis_.”

Dennis grimaces, swears under his breath.  “Jesus Christ,” he hisses, “shit, that’s it _—_ ” Mac seizes the moment and kisses Dennis again, before either of them can realize it happened; rubs the bridge of his nose along Dennis’s agonizingly hot cheekbone. Dennis gasps, and bites his lip, and tells him, “Mac, keep going, God _keep going_ —”

Mac shuts his eyes. Paces himself through it, fisting out ropes of come onto Dennis’s belly. Chews on his lower lip while Dennis groans, low and pained, clenching tight around Mac’s cock with every exhausting wave. His legs shake and pull Mac in. “God _dammit_ ,” he whispers, “that’s it, that’s it, oh fuck baby, fuck _yes,_ ” and his eyes open, feverishly bright, and he snaps up and yanks Mac down until _he’s_ the one doing the kissing and Mac’s heart has jumped into his throat. He rebounds, kisses Dennis back like his life depends on it, and when Dennis breaks away and stares up at him completely cracked open like that Mac’s heart swells with this tremendous surge of pride, like it’s the best thing he’s ever done, like he’s right where he wants to be.

 _I did that_ , he thinks, panting hard, amazed. _I made you come. I_ did _that._

Mac keeps thrusting as Dennis rides his orgasm out, rougher until he’s slamming hard against Dennis’s ass, and when Dennis finishes with one final, immense squeeze Mac bites out a sharp _oh shit_ against Dennis’s reddened mouth, and all that tightening releases in three frenzied, blissful seconds like an electrical explosion. His vision goes blank, and he bites back a whine. He comes hard inside Dennis, buries his face in Dennis’s shoulder.

His arms are trembling hard enough to risk total collapse, so Mac adjusts, lowers himself slowly onto Dennis’s body. They’re drenched in sweat and panting, and Mac’s hair has fallen into his eyes, sticking to his forehead. They lay like that for maybe a minute; Mac is boneless, exhausted, and just this side of suddenly terrified.

His heart won’t stop pounding, and he almost forgets to breathe; like a dog sensing an earthquake, he knows Dennis is going to say something, and Mac will have to move, and they’ll have to figure out how to brush something this huge under the rug. Or they won’t, and Mac can’t wrap his mind around what that might mean.

Dennis nudges him with his chin. “Dude.”

“What?” Mac croaks. “Yeah Dennis?”

Dennis wriggles his hips. Oh. It takes some effort, but Mac struggles downward and pulls out, hissing a little. Dennis winces, and Mac sits back slowly, heavily on his haunches.

“Ohhh fuck,” Dennis groans. Mac flops sideways on the bed. “Goddamn.”

Mac nods absently.

Dennis glances down at his stomach, then flaps a hand weakly at his bathroom. “Hey. Towel.” Mac grunts something vaguely affirmative. “ _Mac_.”

“Gimme a second,” Mac mutters. “Hang on.”

Sixty seconds later, and after Dennis flicks him in the ear, Mac finally drags himself out of bed. He grabs the first towel he sees and, almost an afterthought, tugs and ties the condom off, dropping it into the toilet with a wet _splat_. Reemerging, he tosses the towel at Dennis.

“Dude.” Dennis glowers at him; in his hand is a lit cigarette. “Aim, much?”

 “Sorry.” Mac hits the bed heavily and face-down, listens in a dreamlike trance to Dennis wiping himself down, tossing the rag aside, rustling around in his nightstand. Something pokes him—the pack of cigarettes and Dennis’s lighter. He accepts without comment and crawls back to a sitting position. Dennis is staring straight ahead, seemingly at nothing, the cigarette burning idly between two long fingers. Mac lights his own and observes.

He wants to say something and at the same time his stomach has turned to stone. He wants to go to bed, but that feels too much like unfinished business. He wants to crawl under Dennis’s covers and fall asleep and in the morning wake up with all the answers and Dennis watching him, a fond smile on his face. He at least wants Dennis to say something, because Dennis has all the right words, and Dennis can tell him that the experiment worked—and he can figure out what that means later.

He takes a drag. “So that was, um.” Dennis tenses. “Jesus.”

“Mm.”

“I mean—Carmen’s got nothing on that. Or your mom.” No reply, so he continues. “Seriously, dude, that was like… that was great, man. _You_ were great.”

A short beat. “Awesome,” Dennis says.

“Like, wow, man. Best experiment _ever._ ”

Dennis squeezes the cigarette hard enough for it to crease. “Right.”

“And you and me—we’re still the same.” Mac is watching Dennis carefully, now, for the kicker.

Dennis puts the cigarette to his lips. It’s burned down to the filter.

“I mean,” Mac says, “we’re cool?”

“I’m tired,” Dennis says abruptly, stubbing out his cigarette. Then he slides a new one out of the crumpled pack. “We can do this in the morning.”

Mac’s brow creases with bewilderment. “It’s just a question, Dennis.”

“It can wait.” Dennis lights up again. “You cool with that?”

The East Coast doesn’t get many earthquakes, but when it happens, everyone remembers. “I guess,” Mac says, keenly aware of how Dennis’s hand is trembling. He’s on high alert, but apparently, he can wait. “You want me to leave, or—”

“Do what you want,” Dennis tells him. What Mac wants is to hear Dennis assure him that they’re okay. What Mac does is stub out his cigarette, peel back the covers, and crawl into Dennis’s bed.

He can wait until morning.  He told Dennis he could, so he can.

“So,” Mac says. “Goodnight.”

“Mm.”

Mac turns over. “Oh, before I forget,” he says. “Um. Sorry I kissed you. Before, when we were—I, um. I forgot you didn’t want me to.”

Dennis doesn’t answer that one, and Mac falls asleep with the lights still on; close, and a thousand miles away.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next morning, our heroes try to go back to normal.

It’s past noon when Mac wakes up, which on a Tuesday is still enough time to roll out of his bed and grab a shower before he heads into the bar. Mac does none of these things, however, because his afternoon starts in Dennis’s bed, and none of his Tuesdays ever expected to open up with _that_.

Dennis’s side of the bed is made-up—or unslept in, the evidence is destroyed either way. Further observation yields Dennis’s wallet and cell phone still on his dresser. Their clothes are still lying scattered around the room, but Dennis is nowhere to be found.

Mac starts trying not to freak out.

Best way to figure out if Dennis is still here would be to look for the Range Rover. Since that requires effort and very possibly pants, Mac heads to the kitchen to search for the keys instead—or tries to, when Dennis steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of hazy steam with a towel around his waist. Mac doesn’t even have the courtesy of that, so he dives back into the bed.

Dennis’s bed.

Where they fucked last night. Where they conducted their little _experiment._

The attempt at not freaking out isn’t going so well for Mac.

“Thought you were gonna sleep all day,” Dennis says with a chuckle. “It might’ve gone cold by now, but I made coffee, if you want any.”

Mac stares like a baby deer in the headlights of an oncoming tractor trailer. Seemingly oblivious—unnerved, even—to Mac being naked and in his bed, Dennis pads over to his dresser to put together something to wear. And even that’s got Mac all mixed up—does he look away? Does he _not_ look away? Which is more acceptable? They’ve already _done things_ to each other’s naked sweaty bodies, what’s the protocol after you—

“He _llo_? Anyone home?” Dennis is waving a friendly hand in front of Mac’s face, and all Mac can really focus on is the way Dennis’s damp hair curls around the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” Mac says. “I’m here.” Friendly, that’s the bit rubbing Mac the wrong way—Dennis is acting _friendly_ , talking to him like a happy Labrador he just met in the park. Mac is not a Labrador, and he’s known Dennis for over a quarter of a century, so this sudden emphasis on the hand of friendship is more than a little concerning.

“Okay, good. You were zoning out on me there, buddy,” Dennis says. He’s made it to underwear and a shirt, and the industrial-grade clamp around Mac’s gut loosens, just a little. Then Dennis winces as he bends down to find a pair of jeans, and Mac remembers _why_ he winced, _why_ he’s walking a little bowlegged today, in complete and earth-shattering detail.

“Dennis?”

Dennis has out his foundation, pumping it carefully onto the back of his hand. “You gonna stay in bed all day today or what?” he asks. His jeans are unzipped, hanging loose around his narrow hips. Mac forces himself not to stare—or is that considered rude? “Not a bad idea, you know. Everyone needs a day off sometime.”

“I’m good,” Mac says. He bunches the covers in his hands. “Hey, so. About last night.”

Dennis doesn’t respond, too busy dotting foundation along his nose and the high arch of his cheekbones. Mac decides that this really can’t wait.

“We’re still friends, right Dennis?” Mac blurts out. He regrets it the moment it leaves his lips; it’s too insecure, too vulnerable, and Dennis can smell weakness like blood in the water. “I mean, last night I asked you that and you got kinda weirded out for some reason, and you were like, Let’s talk about this tomorrow, and it _is_ tomorrow, and I just wanted to know—you know.”

Hopefully something got across to Dennis—but he’s snorting, shaking his head. A pitying, ivory-smudged smile slides across his face.

“Are we good?” Mac says. “Back to normal?” First things first—he has to know that him and Dennis are okay. No experiment would ever be worth giving that up, and Mac has a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach that’s asking if he’s tempted fate one too many times. “Like, last night, the experiment—it didn’t mess _us_ up or change us. _Us_ -us.”

He has to hear Dennis say it.

Dennis cranes his neck, blending in smooth circles over his sharp jawline. Mac watches him with mounting anxiety. “Jesus, dude,” Dennis says, “you’re taking this thing, like, _way_ too seriously.”

“It’s an _experiment_ ,” Mac says, incredulous, “I thought that was the _point_.”

“Yeah, but. It’s over,” Dennis says. “Nothing more to do now.”

Mac can think of a lot of things to do now, but what’s causing the pit in his stomach to harden and crust over is just how adept Dennis has suddenly become at avoiding eye contact. He twists the sheets in his hands.

“Now hurry up,” Dennis tells him, “we’re gonna be late.”

Mac blinks, glances at the clock. “It’s like barely a quarter to.”

“Yeah, but we’re gonna stop at Wawa before we go in. Wanna see if the cute cashier chick’s working today.”

Dennis then sticks the tip of his index finger in his mouth. He pulls it out with a slick, wet _pop_ , then drags it across his full lips, wiping off the smear of excess foundation. This time, Mac can’t help but stare, and he doesn’t remember but he thinks he makes a noise, opens his mouth to maybe say something. Dennis’s eyes flash, horribly bright and piercing, and he turns away immediately, heads straight for the living room.

Mac waits until Dennis escapes before he slips out of bed. His heart is racing, hurtling towards a crash, and he's pretty sure Dennis just shifted gears.

—

Dennis has gotten no better at masking the occasional wince every time he walks. And he is walking noticeably funny, which is why he shoves Mac through the door of Paddy’s first.

Unfortunately, this means Mac is the one thrust into the spotlight, as Dee, Charlie, and Frank swarm him.

“You’re back!” “You’re alive!” “Did you bang?” “We’ve been texting you all morning!” “You turn gay yet?”

“Okay, everyone just back off!”  Mac shouts as he shoves his way through the horde. “Back off and don't pester me!”

“We’re not pestering you,” Dee says, following him as Mac heads to safety behind the bar.

“You are _literally_ pestering me. Goddammit.” Mac twists the top off a beer, imagines it’s Dee’s skinny neck. “You people are friggin' _vultures_ sometimes.”

“Guess the experiment didn’t go too well,” Frank says, with a trace of sympathy. Charlie glances from Frank to Mac, but thankfully keeps quiet.

“Jesus Christ, that is _not it_ ,” Mac says, “I just don’t wanna be assaulted the minute I walk in.” He glances up. “Where’d Dennis go?”

Dee jerks a thumb at the back office. “In the back. Want us to drag him back out, pester you two together?”

“Dee, goddammit, there will be _no pestering_.” Still, Mac’s stomach churns. They were _weird_ in the car, tension so thick Mac could feel it in his lungs, insides coated like an oily sludge. Dennis was himself-but-not-himself, and every time Mac tried to bring up the experiment Dennis either changed the subject, or turned the radio up, or acted like there was nothing to talk about, period. And maybe that’s worth a little pestering.

“Then talk about it,” Frank says, gesturing a hand at Mac.  “Tell us what happened.”

“Do I really have to divulge every instance of my _private life_ to you guys, I mean goddammit!” Mac slams his beer on the countertop, for emphasis.

“In this case? Uh, yes, yes you do,” Dee says.

“And how come?”

“’Cause it affects all of us,” Frank says. “You coulda fucked up the whole group dynamic with your little _gay_ _soirée_. We gotta make sure at least your heads are on straight, if nothing else.”

Mac blanches. He’d never quite considered that, and wonders if Dennis thought that far ahead, either. “The dynamic, huh,” he repeats.

“Yeah,” Dee says, “the dynamic. ‘Cause you know Axl and Slash, they _never_ tore GNR apart.”

“Okay, look.” Charlie cuts in with his hands stretched out, brokering peace. “I’m sure that no one fucked up any dynamic, group or just whatever Mac and Dennis have got going on. We don’t need to _pry_ , there’s no need to _fuss_ , we can all keep our heads—”

“That’s bullshit, Charlie, it’s _them_ ,” Dee says, crossing her arms. “They start shit all the goddamn time.”

“That’s taking it a little out of context—”

“I agree with Deandra. Something of this magnitude needs to be out in the open. Totally transparent.” Charlie hesitates, a worried look cutting across his face. “This could have real ramifications for the rest of us. Imagine if Mac and Charlie started banging, for example. Or Mac and Dee.”

Mac chokes on his beer, foam spraying over the bar. Dee puckers her mouth like she’d swallowed a lemon. “That’s actually disgusting,” she says. “I can feel actual, physical disgust from that.”

“I’m even more grossed out than she is,” Mac adds.

“Well of course _you_ are,” Frank says. “But think about it—if that happened, then we’d all have to deal with it. New relationship, new dynamic, people acting weird around each other—”

“Still _suuuper_ grossed out, Frank,” Dee says; Mac retches quietly behind his fist.

“Consequences are gross, what else is new. Where’s Dennis, get him out here.”

“ _Dennis_ and I haven’t even talked about it yet,” Mac says, as Dee slips into the back office.

Charlie narrows his eyes. “You haven’t talked about it, like…”

“He’s being super weird and avoidant whenever I try to bring it up,” Mac explains, sagging over the countertop. “Which is honestly starting to sound like a good idea, because guess what, I don’t wanna talk about it with you guys _either_.”

 “It’s a little too late for that, Mac,” Frank says. “Ah, there he is—Dennis!”

Dennis saunters out of the back office like he’s ready to star in a skincare commercial, bright-faced and calm, undeterred by the potential shitstorm gathering off the coast of Paddy’s Pub. Mac grips the neck of his bottle with hurricane force. “I miss all the fun?”

No one’s face projects anything remotely similar to the concept of fun. Frank looks appraising, Dee looks cautious, and Charlie looks… Mac actually wonders if that might be suspicion, reads it in the tiny lines around Charlie’s eyes and the square set of his shoulders. “Actually,” Frank says, “the fun's just getting started.”

“Oh good,” Dennis says with a grin. “What’re we talking about?”

“Last night.” Mac looks him dead in the eye—or would, if Dennis were quite meeting his gaze. “See, Dennis? Now we’re _all_ talking about it.”

“Are we, now,” Dennis says. His grin tightens. “Okay. What about last night?”

“We’re trying to figure out if you and Mac fucked up the group dynamic when you banged yesterday,” Dee says. “You’re both acting weird as shit.”

“Dee, don’t be ridiculous,” Dennis scoffs. “I would _never_ do anything to jeopardize the Gang, you know that. As for me and Mac, well.” He shrugs, unconcerned. “My part in the experiment is over, Mac can take it from here. Nothing _earth-shattering_ happened, you guys. There’s really nothing to talk about.”

Dee’s mouth flattens into a thin line. “Yeah, jury’s out on that one,” she says.

“Okay, _what_ is going on?” Dennis says. He takes a step away from the bar, as the grin starts to crack. “Is this an intervention?”

“More like an interrogation,” Charlie says evenly. “What _really_ happened last night between you two? You and Mac come in this morning, you run straight into the back office, Mac’s acting all weird and paranoid—”

“First off, I didn't _run_ into the back office—” “It’s not paranoia if there’s something to be paranoid _about_ , okay—”

“—and we just want to know, did you guys get up to anything…” Charlie struggles to find the right word. “ _Different?_ ”

Pointing to himself, Dennis takes another few steps back. “What, you want me to answer?” he says. “Why not get _Mac_ to talk about it? He’s the one you all glommed onto when we got in.”

“That’s because you pushed me ahead of you so I would take the heat.”

“No, _you_ just barged in like you always do.”

“You’re _both_ on the stand as far as we’re concerned,” Frank says. “Start talking.”

“What, do you want the _sordid details_ as well for your sick, perverted crop of fantasies?” Dennis says, venom dripping from every word as he rounds on Frank.

“No one has the patience for that,” Frank says. “We just wanna know you guys didn’t screw _us_ up.”

Bewildered, Dennis huffs a weak laugh. “That’s it?” he says. “ _That’s_ what I was dragged out here for? A simple reassurance? It’s _fine_. _We’re_ fine. Everything is all right, guys, there’s nothing you need to—”

“I’m not all right,” Mac says quietly. His heart is hammering, an ominous echo in the bar; the Gang's focus is suddenly all on him, and Dennis’s stare pierces right through, shreds whatever scraps of bravery Mac managed to snatch up. He steels himself and presses on. “So, you know. That's something.”

Dennis’s cold cruel mouth cracks into a sneer. “Well,” he says. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“Are you?” Mac says. “’Cause if you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have brushed me off this morning when I wanted to talk about it. Or last night.”

“Oh, you mean last night when you turned into a whimpering, lovesick _girl_ in my bed not even _minutes_ after I’d had my way with you? That last night?”

“’Had your way with him’?” Dee says, her lip curling.

“Thought it was the other way around,” Frank mutters.

“The hell do you mean, I turned into a girl?” Mac shouts, shoulders stiffening. “What, because I tried to figure out why you were being so cold and weird all of a sudden?” Dennis scoffs, sucks in his cheeks. “Dude, I was starting to worry I did something wrong!”

“Because that’s _so_ hard to imagine.”

“That’s exactly it! I don’t know because you’re just pretending like nothing happened!” Mac snaps his hands out to his sides, boiling with rage. “Dude, the whole point of us even _doing_ anything was for me to figure out if—if—”

Dennis’s eyes darken. “If what, Mac?” he says, deadly low, a cobra poised to strike.

Mac grinds his teeth; a vein pulses in his jaw. If what, Dennis knows _damn_ well ‘if what.’ He doesn’t need to fucking say it. “You weren’t supposed to brush me off,” he says again, “you’re my best friend. Best friends don’t do that shit.”

“Yeah? Best friend, Mac?” Dennis is shouting now, the tips of his ears bright red as he white-knuckles the edge of a table. “Do _best friends_ offer to fuck each other out of a crisis? Do _best friends_ get all super weird and emotional and _intimate_ with each other? Do _best friends_ let all their _feelings_ get in the way of logic and reason and shit, instead of burying them deep down like they usually do?”

“No!” Mac yells back, equally enraged and slightly flummoxed. “They don’t do that shit! Not usually!”

“So then _what the fuck was that last night?_ ”

“I don’t know! You won’t talk about it! And every time I try to bring it up you change the goddamn subject or shut down completely!”

Dennis rattles the table, purplish face working in anger. He squeezes his eyes shut tight, jawline rigid with tension; then like flicking on a light switch, he releases the table from his wrathful grasp, and draws in a deep breath. “You know what?” he says, his voice whisper-soft. “I really can’t deal with you right now.”

“Well guess what, buddy? I can’t deal with _you_ either!”

“Oh _yeah?_ ”

“ _Yeah!_ ”

“ENOUGH!”

Heaving with exertion, Mac and Dennis whirl around; Mac’s nostrils are flared and Dennis’s shoulders are squared off like he’s itching for a fight. Charlie stands in front of Dee and Frank near the back office, and they’re all wearing matching expressions of grim determination. And Charlie is holding—

“Goddammit, not this shit again,” Dennis says.

Dee and Frank flank Charlie as he marches forth with Paddy’s Charter held carefully in his hands.  They all look like the recipients of bad news—or in this case, more likely, the harbingers.

“You know,” Dennis says, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “I’ve about had it with this day, and it's barely even begun for me.”

“What’s with the Charter, bro?” Mac asks, nodding off at it. “We already swore on it, we don’t need to do it again. Not like we’re gonna be _experimenting_ anytime soon,” he adds, with a dark glare in Dennis’s direction. Dennis remains infuriatingly impassive, arms crossed tight over his chest.

“Mac, you're right. You guys did swear an oath on it,” Charlie says. His voice is cracking, like he’s holding something back, a realization his brain’s more than ready to reject. “And given the current circumstances, we’ve reason to believe… you also kinda broke it.”

Dennis huffs a short, angry laugh. “Broke it _how_ ,” he says.

“Either you guys remained friends,” Dee points to them, “or we’d let the Charter decide your punishment.”

“Punishment?” Mac’s blood ices over. “What punishment? There’s no punishments in the Charter.”

Dennis, on the other hand, has paled considerably. “Dee,” he says haltingly, “no, that—that doesn’t apply in this scenario. That’s not how that section’s supposed to be implemented.”

“Frank?” Charlie isn’t looking at Frank; he’s looking at Mac, trying desperately not to let apology leak through his expression. “Can you read aloud for us Article II, section 6, ‘On Internal Conducts and Misaffairs’?”

Frank squints. “Says ‘Infernal,’” he reads out. “Article II, section 6. ‘ _Should any of the initiated’_ —that’s us— _’go so far as to have infernal drama, mischief-making, or other forms of bullshittery, those members are to be cast out, and are not to return to Paddy’s Pub lest their personal bullshit be solved posthaste.’_ ” He frowns at the Charter. “Who wrote this part?”

“Dennis did. I added stuff to it,” Mac says. The words turn over and over in his brain, catching on _infernal_ , on _cast out_. “And that’s not—this isn’t drama. We’re grown men, we don’t _have_ drama.”

“You don’t?” Dee frowns at them. “So what, you guys are cool with having slept together now? You’re not gonna keep being weird and arguing shit so we can all go back to normal?”

Dennis doesn’t answer, and Mac bites his cheek.

“See what I mean?” Dee doesn’t sound victorious. She leans her head in her hand, watching the two of them with a resigned effort at pity. “Goodbye, GNR.”

“But we _are_ friends,” Mac says hurriedly; it's his last shot at peace and he has to take it, even if his hands are shaking and his aim is off. His gaze slides nervously over to Dennis; all he needs to hear is that they’re okay, that they’ve survived this much, that they’ll survive this as well. They always have, before. “Like, yeah we’re arguing right _now_ , but that doesn’t mean we’re not _friends_. Right, Dennis?”

Dennis meets his eyes, then turns to Dee, says, “This is really getting absolutely ridiculous,” and Mac’s heart snaps in half. “It’s a bullshit punishment, it doesn’t _mean_ anything. Come on, guys, this is absurd!”

Charlie’s face is grim. “You swore on it,” he says. “You and Mac both.”

 “That doesn’t—you can’t just kick us out of the bar!” Dennis shrieks, white with rage. “We own this place!”

“ _I_ own this place,” Frank corrects. “And right now, you and Mac are gonna take a nice little vacation and get the hell out of _my_ bar.”

“Who’s gonna tend bar, hmm? Is it you, Frank?” He’s grasping at straws. Dennis gestures to the Gang in turn. “You know, you—you can’t even see over the bar! Or what about Charlie, because _that_ makes sense, having the grubby, illiterate _janitor_ serving people cocktails. ‘Oh, you mean you _didn’t_ want a toilet snake in your Old Fashioned? I’m sorry, I get it mixed up with the swizzle sticks _all the time!_ ’”

“Dude,” Charlie says.

“And Dee—Sweet Dee. Is this really what you’re left with, Frank? _Sweet Dee?_ Because if you so much as think about putting her in a bar setting in _any_ capacity beyond mediocre waitress, I’m quite sure the alcohol would _literally_ turn to poison as the customers drank it,” Dennis says. His eyes are blazing with an all-consuming fury. “Frank, what even are your options here? You need us here, you need _me!_ ”

Frank shrugs. Mac’s impressed that Dennis’s head doesn’t physically explode into confetti. “We’ll manage,” Frank says. “Now get out.”

“YOU NEED ME!” Dennis screams again.

“Get out or you’re suspended without pay.”

Dennis stares at the Gang in utter disbelief, blue eyes as wide as dinner plates. “And you’re all in agreement with this?” he says. “You’re all on board with what this—this _farce_ of a constitution says. You’re just gonna let _me_ go.”

“Going _once_.”

“Dennis, come on, let’s just drop it,” Mac mutters, ears burning with embarrassment as he takes a few backwards steps towards the exit. Snarling like a rabid animal, teeth stark white against his blotchy red face, Dennis storms out, shouldering past Mac without acknowledgment.

Mac looks around at Frank, Charlie, and Dee, and his stomach drops out from under him.

“Man, don’t—don’t make this hard for us,” Charlie says. The hurt in his tone is genuine, it’s hard to pretend it’s not; Mac swallows past a growing lump in his throat.

“You’re really doing it,” he says; his voice sounds distant, a thin echo in his mind. “You’re making us leave?”

Even Dee looks guilty, which is when Mac realizes they’re in seriously deep shit. “It’s just until you and Dennis can sort yourselves out,” she says, and for once she doesn’t sound shrill or spiteful. If anything… she sounds apologetic.

With his stomach in knots, Mac turns to the last standing member of the Gang, hoping for a call to give him last-minute clemency. “Frank?”

Frank shakes his head.  

Mac coughs up something that was probably a laugh in another lifetime, and backs his way towards the exit. “Well, then,” he says, “screw you guys. You know, it’s, I’m—whatever. Screw you—I said that. I don’t care, though. I’m going home.” He slams the door, hoping for catharsis. It doesn’t come.

It makes him feel far worse.

“Typical. Self-serving bastards, the whole lot. I hope they all rot in there,” a cold voice says behind him.

It takes Mac eight good, long seconds to quash the urge to throttle Dennis right there on the broken pavement. The image of gray concrete smeared pink with his viscera is almost too good to give up. “Dude,” he says, “ _we_ started this.”

“ _They_ kicked us out!”

 “ _None_ of this would’ve happened if you weren’t such a self-absorbed asshole!”

“And none of _this_ ,” Dennis says, stabbing his finger into Mac’s chest, “would have happened if _you_ weren’t such a cowardly, _insecure_ little shit!”

They’re literally butting heads at this point, noses smushed together in shared anger. Dennis is snarling directly in his face. Mac doesn’t know if he wants to kiss him or kill him.

He’s at least leaning towards the latter.

“Do you wanna keep arguing about this?” Dennis says out of nowhere, fists rapidly curling and uncurling.

“No! I actually don’t!”

“Me either!”

They separate, breathing hard like they’d run a marathon. Mac is wrestling with way too many emotions right now, grappling at them, unable to keep up—confusion, anxiety, fear, anger. He tries to shove everything into the familiar comfort of anger, but he keeps glancing over at Dennis and the anger keeps stealing out of his grasp, leaving him cold and lost and broken in too many places.

Still panting, Dennis looks away, shuffling from foot to foot. “Can’t believe they fuckin’ kicked us out. Of our _own_ goddamn bar,” he says.

Mac rests his hands on his thighs. “Yeah,” he huffs, “some friends.” He exhales deeply; his head is ready to fall off. “Now what’re we supposed to do?”

Dennis snorts, a non-answer, and stalks over to the Range Rover, where he flings the door open with a controlled viciousness. Mac acts on autopilot and parks himself in the passenger’s seat, snapping the door shut hard; Dennis doesn’t even _bitch_ , just shoves the key in the ignition and whips the wheel around.

The drive back to their apartment is suffocatingly silent.

Mac gets out of the car first, eager and determined to get back to his room and slam the door, a couple times, a thousand times, and then—then just punch a pillow or something, or break a small and beautiful and delicate object, he’ll take anything at this point. He makes it to the front door when he realizes Dennis is still in the car.

 _Keep walking_ , a dangerous voice thinks. _Seriously, man,_ fuck _him._

Mac tromps back to the car, raps on the window. Dennis rolls it down a crack. “You’re not getting out?” Mac says.

Elegant fingers drum along the edge of the steering wheel. “I’m going for a drive,” Dennis says suddenly, like he’d just decided it in the moment. He keys the ignition again and Mac backs up, watching him peel out of the street, tires squealing in protest.

Mac storms into their apartment and slams the door behind him; it rattles severely, shakes him all way to his chest. His ribs are still rattling several hours later, when Mac’s long done slamming doors and is lying face-up on his bed with his phone an inch away from his outstretched arm, waiting for a call, an apology, an absolution; at least for his thoughts to finally shut up.

—

_staying at a hotel tonight. dont wait up._

Mac stares at the text. His chest feels hollow.

He doesn’t answer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac and Dee share a drunken adventure in the living room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If "flagrant and excessive consumption of grain alcohol and Gatorade" doesn't merit the Alcohol Abuse tag then by _gum_ , nothing does. Watch out for brief descriptions of vomiting and please drink responsibly.

“Mac, what the shit.”

“Hello to you too, Dee,” Mac says. Dee has her arms crossed in front of her and a sour puss on her face. Not for the first time this afternoon, Mac has some serious regrets about this, but his list of options runs incredibly limited on such short notice.

He should look into getting new friends. Friends who aren’t ignoring his calls (Frank), busy (Charlie), or the absolute worst (The Pope, who fucking else). It’s been a whole entire day, he could’ve definitely scrounged up a couple contenders instead of wallowing around like a miserable caged animal, jumping every single time his phone buzzed. And yet—

“You texted 911.” Dee glances around Mac’s form in the doorway. “Look, if you iced Dennis in there, I’m not helping you hide the body, ‘cause that has Charlie work written all over it.”

“Dennis isn’t even here, Dee,” Mac says. “No, I… I wanted to talk to you.”

Shock floods Dee’s face as her eyebrows sail towards her hairline. “To _me_ ,” she says.

“Yeah, you know, we never really hang out, and—”

“Yeah. That’s right. We _don’t_. We don’t hang out. On principle,” Dee says, like it should be obvious. Which Mac was a little afraid of. “Why _would_ I want to hang out with you without the rest of the Gang?”

“Well, because…” Mac struggles to come up with something convincing. “I mean, I did invite Charlie, but he says he’s already got a thing, and Frank’s not picking up—”

“Oh, I get it,” Dee says, scowling. “Ol’ Sweet Dee’s the _last resort_ friend.”

“Well,” Mac says, considering a rebuttal. It’s not worth the effort. “Yeah.”

“I’m leaving.”

“Wait!” Dee halts, glowering at him. “Dee, I just—I really need to talk shit about Dennis with someone, okay? And you’re like, the perfect person to do that with. I _actually_ need you for once—see, Dee? You’re finally useful!”

“Mac, none of this?” Dee zigzags a finger. “Is helping your case any. G’bye.”

“I have grain alcohol!”

 Dee stops mid-step as the plea registers. She very slowly turns back around. “What kind of grain alcohol.”

“Everclear. Oh, and Gatorade.”

“No shit, dickweed, I meant the proof. 151 or 190?”

“Both,” Mac tells her seriously.

Dee narrows her eyes, considering. “And the Gatorade flavor?”

“Lemon-lime. They didn’t have the blue,” Mac says with a frown.

“Whatever,” Dee says. “I’m in.”

—

Dee commandeers the 151 for herself, since she has to drive back to her apartment eventually. Privately, Mac thinks it’s because she can’t handle the stronger stuff, and he takes a sort of pride at knocking back a good fourth of his (much stronger, and _way_ more manlier) bottle in less than two hours.

But what Dee lacks in hardcore alcoholism, she _totally_ makes up for in shit-talking Dennis.

“He’s just, he’s just the _worst_ ,” Dee explains for the third time that evening. “Like, no, Mac, you don’t even understand. He’s _always_ been the worst.”

Sprawled out across the couch, Mac takes another sloppy pull. “He’s awful,” he says loudly.

“The worst,” Dee agrees, rocking back and forth on the floor. “Like—like when we were kids? When we were kids? We’re twins, right?”

“Right.”

“So we have the same birthday.”

“You _do_ ,” Mac says in awe.

“But like—wait, hang on.” Dee takes a swig of the Everclear, then the Gatorade; wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. “Like. We’d always have this birthday party, right. But Frank made us choose who the party was _for_ —like who got the presents, and who got their name on cake.”

“That’s messed up.”

“Yeah. Well. He made us flip a coin for it, and _Dennis_ , Dennis would always say, _riiiight_ before Frank flipped it.” Dee sniffs, brows drawing down in remembered anger. “ _‘Heads I win, tails you lose.’_ It was fucked up, man.”

Mac thinks about that for a long moment.

“You know? And ‘cause he, like, said it before I got to say it, it was always either—”

Mac fucking _bursts out laughing._

“Goddammit, fuck you,” Dee snaps, tossing a Gatorade cap at him. Mac’s stomach actually hurts; he half-collapses off the couch, thick glass bottom of the Everclear bottle dragging across the floor as he wheezes his way through his sides burning up.

“You fucking— _you fucking_ —Dee, goddammit it you’re a stupid bitch,” Mac says.

“ _Dennis_ is a stupid bitch!” Dee says. “He’s an asshole!”

“Yeah, but—but you fucking—you _fell_ for it! Every goddamn time! Holy shit, dude.” Mac finally sets the bottle down before it spills, then wipes at his eyes. He sniffs, sits up a little. “But Dennis is an asshole though, that’s like—that’s the goddamn truth of it.”

“He’s the goddamn worst!” Dee crows.

“I know!” Mac hesitates. “The fuck can we even do about it, though? Like—you know?”

“The fuck did he even, like, _bitch_ at you about,” Dee says, as she crawls into a chair and slings herself across its arms. The bottle of Everclear is roughly halfway gone, although a fair portion’s sloshed over the table and the floor. “Like. I know you two _suck_ , just in general, but you’ve been fighting for a couple days now. What’re you pussybitchin’ about this time?”

“It’s just—Dee, I don’t even _know_ , okay—”

“You two realize that, like, you guys cause all our shit,” Dee says, jabbing the butt of her bottle at Mac’s slumped form. “And Frank.”

“And Frank.”

“But it’s mostly you guys,” Dee continues. She dumps Everclear into her Gatorade and swirls it around. “Whatever shit you got going on fucking bleeds over and shit. Like, that’s why we had to kick you out. Besides the Charter. You’re bad eggs and you were gonna stink up the place.”

Mac flushes bright red, burns with embarrassment.

“But if you don’t get shit fixed with him, then like, you’re _never_ gonna come back, pal,” Dee says, twisting around in the chair to give Mac a stern and disapproving look. “Like, what, was the sex bad?”

Mac’s head is buzzing, quiet and insistent. “No, it was,” he says, and his hands fall limply between his thighs. “It was fuckin’ _great_ , Dee. It was fuckin’ great.”

Dee grimaces. “Wow.”

“Like, best sex of my life. Better than your mom, better than Carmen. Better than anyone I’ve _ever_ … yeah.” He can’t explain why. Or rather, he can explain why and he would rather die first.

Maybe if he keeps drinking.

“Dennis is not that good in bed,” Dee slurs, peering over her Gatorade. “I’ve heard him. He takes so goddamn _long_.”

“I know, I’ve seen the tapes,” Mac says, nodding. “But it was just. Like. When we did it? When we actually banged? It was _good_. I just felt… I felt _close_ to him, y’know?”

“No,” Dee says, pulling a face like she’d watched him eat a live rat.

“I don’t know how to explain it. We were all the same as we usually are, but it was like we were the only ones we gave a shit about. And I liked that. I _liked_ that about us. About him. Goddammit.” Mac reaches for the alcohol, bypassing the Gatorade. “It was fun and weird and, and hot—Dee, holy shit, I feel so bad you don’t have a dick right now because it was _so goddamn tight_ —”

“Please stop talking about your dick in Dennis’s butt,” Dee says, vaguely nauseated.

“Right, but like—man, I don’t even know.” Mac sinks into the couch, slapping his arms along the back. “And the whole point was, was like—”

“The gay thing.” Dee burps; her eyelids fall closed, stagger open.

“Yeah, like figure out how I’m not gay and all. And he won’t even look at me.” Mac hangs his head, neck all rubbery and warm. He drums his fingers along the neck of the bottle. “I fucked up.”

“ _No_.”

“I did. I fucked it up. He was gonna help me not be gay, and then we had gay sex, and now we can’t even be friends, because how do you come back from _having gay sex_ with your best friend?”

“Mac, look, Dennis fucked up too,” Dee insists. “It’s not just you. It’s _both_ of you.”

“So, what, we deserve this?” Mac suddenly wishes he hadn’t said anything, because as much as he wants to hear an answer—he also seriously _doesn’t._

“Shit, dude, I dunno.” Dee flops an arm against her chair. “Did it work?”

“What, the experiment?” She hums. “Dee, I don’t know. I just—I don’t.”

“Huh.” Dee appraises him with a curious stare. “Was it at least worth it? Experimenting with my brother: yea or nay?”

The question settles around Mac’s ears like a crown of thorns, because of course this is the cross God chose for him to bear. But it’s not like he learned anything new about himself.

(That’s a lie. He learned that he could stay in bed with Dennis for the rest of his life, the two of them together, exploring an intimacy that felt devastatingly important; something no one else had any idea existed, fragile and new and just for them. And he learned shortly thereafter that you can’t always get what you want.)

“I guess,” Mac says feebly, unsettled by the vague feelings of guilt tethered to him like a shadow. “Sex was good at least. I even wore a condom.”

“Dude, too much—that’s too much—” Dee’s hand shoots up to cover her mouth, eyes widening. “Oh shit.”

“Dee, you goddamn bitch, you know where the fucking bathroom is,” Mac snaps at her. “You do _not_ throw up in my goddamn living room.”

“Yeah, one sec,” Dee says, words mushed between a fist pressed hard to her lips. She tumbles out of the chair and flies to the bathroom; Mac hears her knees bang hard on the tile floor, the rattle of the toilet cover, then the awful echoing sounds of retching.

Mac rolls his eyes and stumbles to his feet, swaying hard, room spinning like a carousel ride from hell. His head is dangerously heavy and possibly about to fall off; carefully, he teeters to the bathroom, dropping with a _thud_ to his knees next to Dee.

“Goddamn stupid bitch,” he mutters, holding up her hair.

—

“See, I always thought hotels were like, rate you by the hour-type places, you know, for prostitutes and such.”

“That would be a _motel_ , Charlie, not a hotel. A hotel is usually a classier establishment, and they offer all types of rentals for all manner of clientele.”

“Including prostitutes.”

“Well, not exactly, at a _hotel_ you’d usually call them ‘escorts,’ but the place I’m staying at doesn’t offer— _holy_ _shit._ ”

Bleary-eyed, Dee flaps a hand at Dennis and Charlie. She’s hanging over the edge of the couch. “Surprise,” she says.

Dennis stares at her in horror. “Dee, what the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

Dee holds up her empty Gatorade bottle and winks. “Drankin’.”

“ _No_ , really?” Dennis says tightly. “Because I couldn't already tell. What is this? Where’s Mac?”

“Yo.” From his new position on the floor behind the couch, Mac sticks his hand in the air and gives it a lazy wave. “Still here, bro.”

Charlie sniffs the air. “What were you guys drinking, paint thinner? Because it smells a little like paint thinner.” He picks his way over an upturned chair and a stray Gatorade bottle. He finds Dee’s bottle on the table, and his brows draw down in deep concern. “Were you guys pounding straight grain alcohol?”

“No!” Mac shouts, and Dee adds triumphantly, “We mixed it with the Gatorade!”

“You _mixed it with the Gatorade_ ,” Dennis says, a sharp, emotionless echo.

“Yeah,” Dee says, grinning wide. “Lemon- _liiiiime_ , biatch _._ ”

Stiff with fury, Dennis pinches the bridge of his nose. “All right. Charlie, how much do you think they had to drink?”

“Officially? Uh.” Charlie peers at Dee’s bottle. “This one’s about half done, and they spilled it all over your apartment. If they split it that’s not too bad, they can probably sleep that off, I’m guessing—”

“We _didn’t_ split it!” Mac says, obnoxiously proud, and he stabs his bottle high in the air. “Dee can’t handle a real man’s liquor!”

Dennis stalks over to Mac’s gravity-bound form and snatches the bottle from him. He checks the label, and immediately his lips press into a tight thin line. “Oh look,” he says, the words dripping from his tongue like acid. “That’s even _better_.”

“Yeah. Don’t want Dee’s germs on me,” Mac says.

“You’re a goddamn germ!”

“And _you_ are both sloppy children with nothing better to do, apparently, than drink grain alcohol and make a mess of my goddamn apartment!” Dennis says, splashing Everclear out of Mac’s bottle as his arms snap out to his sides.

Mac burps quietly beneath Dennis’s strikingly tall figure. “Children shouldn’t drink,” he mumbles.

“If only there were laws against that,” Charlie says, and Dennis snorts in agreement.

“You guys, it’s, it’s _fine_ , I upchucked earlier, s’all good,” Dee says, slicing a hand through the air in what’s meant to be a reassuring gesture. “Got it all outta me.”

“In the toilet bowl, I hope,” Dennis says.

“It’s sorta on the floor too, dude,” Mac says, and Dennis’s pale mouth tightens even more. “And what the fuck are you doing back here, you goddamn—you _bad_ _egg._ ”

“You tell ‘im, Mac.”

Dennis merely arches an eyebrow. “I _was_ here to pick up my Wii, to take back to my hotel room,” he says. “Since I’ve no desire to play Wii Sports with a gibbering, inebriated manchild.”

“ _No_. That is _my_ game,” Mac retorts, stabbing a finger up at Dennis. “The games are _mine_ , Dennis, that’s how it works.”

“Fine, then I want it for Netflix. It’s coming back with me either way, because I’m not staying here with you.” Dennis steps around Mac, leaving him struggling to stand without the room mercilessly beating him back down. When he manages to remain upright for more than a few seconds, Mac catches sight of Dee leaning heavily on Charlie, her face tinged an unsettling shade of green.

Dennis nods at her. “Is she all right?” he says quietly.

“She should be, but just to be on the safe side, I think I’m gonna take her back to my apartment,” Charlie says, and casts a pitying look at Dee.

Dee burps, eyes bulging, and shakes her head. “My place. Not yours. Yours is gross.”

“Okay, _Dee’s_ apartment, fine. Whatever.” Dee burps again, mouth working like she’s going to be sick. Miraculously, it passes, and Dee’s head lolls on Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie settles a hand on Dee’s hip and jerks his head at Mac. “What about him?”

“What about him?” Dennis repeats. Mac sways over the edge of the couch.

“You don’t think he’s gonna…” Charlie frowns.

Dennis glances from Charlie propping up Dee, to Dee slumping over Charlie, to Mac slumping over the couch. He exhales, world-weary. “We’ll figure out something.”

“Right. Just… keep me posted,” Charlie says, and pats Dee. “Okay, Drunky Brewster, let’s find your keys.”

“Drunky Brewster.” Dee snickers. “ _Brewster._ ”

“Bye Charlie,” Mac says with a wave as they shuffle out of Mac and Dennis’s apartment, Dee’s keys in Charlie’s hand. “Bye Dee.”

Dennis shuts the door and locks it.

“Sorry about the bathroom,” Mac says, twisting one ankle around the other. He feels all of eight years old. “Dee has bad aim.”

Dennis completely ignores him, busies himself collecting bottles and orange caps from the floor.

“She’s stupid,” Mac adds. 

“Yeah, well, you’re not far behind her on the short bus, Mac,” Dennis says. “Jesus Christ.” He gets to Mac’s bottle of Everclear and glares at it, before slamming it down hard on the table. The sharp sound pierces through Mac’s skull like a bullet, and the room swims angrily in response, colors bursting and scattering to pieces.

He sits down, hunches over.

“Don’t you start too,” Dennis warns, and Mac shakes his head, curling over himself, leaning his eyes heavily into his hand. His stomach’s beginning to roil, and his mouth suddenly gets a thick wash of saliva.

A split-second later, Dennis shoves his hands under Mac’s armpits, hauling him off of the couch. Mac stumbles blindly, guided by Dennis into a bright white room where the smell of vomit hits his nose with a vengeance. He hears Dennis swear loudly, and the rings of the shower curtain clattering as it’s ripped back. Mac’s arms smack into the rim of the bathtub and his body goes rigid as a board as he expels what feels like his entire GI tract into one small tub.

He’s only vaguely aware of Dennis’s hands steadying him, one across his back, one holding onto his shoulder. And it just _comes_ and _comes_ and _comes_ , and when it stops, Mac is heaving raggedly, half-collapsed against the unforgiving rim.

He spits, cracks his gritty eyes open, swipes his hand across his mouth. There’s a thin smear of red on his skin.  He falls back heavily on his heels, throat like sandpaper, lungs burning hard with every painful gasp. Someone kneels next to him, and something cool and wet gets pressed against the corner of his mouth, working in small circles. It’s soothing, almost unbearable. Mac leans his cheek into it.

Then abruptly pulls away and just barely manages to stick his head over the bathtub before all his bad decisions come roaring back for more.

—

The bathroom resembles a fallout zone by the time Dennis drags Mac out twenty minutes later. He strips Mac down to his briefs and tosses him into bed; Mac groans upon landing, squinting through puffy, swollen eyelids.

The pillow smells familiar. The pillow smells like Dennis.

“If you so much as think about throwing up in my bed, I promise you, they will not find the body,” Dennis threatens. Mac registers none of it, and presses his cheek further into Dennis’s pillow. “Mac!”

Mac mumbles something, rolling over. Dennis’s scent floods him.

“Christ,” Dennis mutters. Mac closes his eyes.

He wanders in and out of consciousness for a while, content to lie there and listen. Dennis can be heard puttering around his room, talking to himself under his breath; through slitted eyelids, Mac watches as Dennis’s silhouette hunches first over the toilet, then the bathtub, issuing all sorts of choice words for Dee and Mac—and something about corn subsidies and the government, Mac doesn’t quite get that one.

He listens to Dennis clean the bathroom and snuggles into the bed. It’s calming. Despite the way his head threatens to fall off if he moves too suddenly—it’s peaceful in here.

Enough time passes that when Dennis is finished, Mac can at least roll onto his back without his stomach promising an uprising. Dennis has left the bathroom—Mac struggles to focus, but eventually Dennis’s hazy form resolves in front of him.

And said form isn’t wearing much at all.

Mac squints; Dennis is down to dark boxer-briefs, bent at the waist in search of something. Mac grunts softly, an appreciative noise, and slips a hand beneath the waistband of his underwear. He tugs his lower lip through his teeth, and slides his thighs apart; like a rabbit listening for predators in the grass, Dennis darts up, whips around. His face tumbles through a series of scandalized expressions as he strides over to Mac, and he yanks Mac’s hand out of his briefs immediately.

“ _Dennis_ ,” Mac whines, pouting his best. “C’mon.”

“No. _No_. Abso-goddamn-lutely—how can you even get it up right now?” Dennis hisses. God, if looks could kill; Dennis gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “drop-dead gorgeous.” “Does whiskey dick mean nothing to you? Shouldn’t _Everclear dick_ have you completely annihilated?”

Mac takes that as a compliment. “Luck o’ the Irish,” he boasts, boozy grin stretched too hard, too wide.

Dennis's stare is flat and unending. “Jesus Christ, dude.”

“You’re pretty hot, Dennis,” Mac slurs; Dennis’s expression shutters, but he doesn’t move away. “Can’t help it.”

“Can. _Can_ help it. Mac, come on, you’re _beyond_ wasted.”

“Yeah,” Mac says, and he offers Dennis a rueful smile. “Don’t change much.”

Dennis backs away and finishes dressing as quickly as possible, throwing on a soft gray T-shirt and worn sweatpants. Mac rocks back into the pillow, bubbling with excitement when the bed bounces beside him.

“Knew you’d come back,” he says as his head lolls to the side. Dennis is rather pointedly not looking at him. “You always do.”

“Yeah, well, roommate hunting is a bitch,” Dennis says. He draws his knees up to his chest. “And I’m still taking my Wii.”

“No no, like, _here_ ,” and Mac plops the bed with one uncoordinated hand. “Wanna bang?”

“Good _God_ , Mac.”

“C’mon man, it’ll be—it’ll be fun,” Mac insists. “Wanna top? I’ll let you top.”

“Are you actually hearing yourself right now?” Dennis exclaims, staring at Mac with deep horror.

Mac shrugs, loose and open. “Dude, Den, having sex with you was, was like.” He shakes his head in wonder, gestures aimlessly around Dennis’s bedroom. “You didn’t let me tell you before, but it was the _shit_ , man. It was fuckin’ _the best._ I pounded off to it _four_ _times_ already.”

All the color drains from Dennis’s face.

“I’d totally do it again if you wanted to,” Mac tells him seriously. “Even if you are mad at me.”

“Even if that makes you gay.”

“No, Dennis, goddammit, don’t ruin it,” Mac says. Dread tangles around his stomach like a mass of thick vines. “That’s not—that is _not_ what this is about. I’m not _gay_ , man.”

Dennis is quiet.

“I’m _not_ , really—I promise you, I’m not,” Mac says.

“You’re sure?” Dennis asks, so low that Mac first wonders if he’s dreaming. He stares up at Dennis, tracing the way all his features swim and blur together, stark pale and twin spots of bright, brilliant blue.

He smiles but it’s hollow, a non-answer; meaningless in the face of everything he does and does not want to know.

Dennis drops his head into his hand, massaging his temples.

“So _that's_ why you didn’t wanna talk about it,” Mac says. “Earlier. The experiment failed on you.”

Dennis sighs. “Not exactly,” he says. “But for the sake of argument? Yeah, sure.”

Mac stares at him, drunk and open-mouthed in astonishment. “Damn,” he says. “That sucks, dude.”

“Yeah,” Dennis mutters, “no shit.”

Mac relaxes into the pillow, watching in silent contemplation as Dennis picks at his nails. “Hey,” he murmurs, and Dennis raises an eyebrow in acknowledgment. “Thanks, man.”

“For?”

Mac hums. “Being here,” he says. “Being my best friend. Experimenting with me, even though I’m not gay and it didn’t work.” He pauses. “Cleaning the bathroom?”

“ _Christ_ that was disgusting. You’re buying us more Comet.”

Mac nods, nestles into the pillow. “Love you, bro,” he says.

“Aw, Jesus Christ Mac, _don’t_ —” Dennis holds out a hand in warning. “Don’t.”

“Too late,” Mac says. “Kinda already said it.”

“Yeah, _I’m aware._ Just—go to sleep, okay buddy? Go to _sleep_. Now can I trust you not to choke on your own vomit and die in my bed, or do I have to stay here tonight too?”

Mac thinks about it. “Probably stay,” he says. “Just in case.”

“Of course. Of course,” Dennis says, as his lips pinch into a frown.  “Friggin’, goddamn Everclear. Goddamn _Dee._ ” Cursing under his breath, he slips under the covers, keeping a very, very safe distance between himself and Mac.

Mac lets out a breath, smiling dazedly, staring at the bumps of Dennis’s spine that stretch and peek through his thin cotton shirt. It’s somewhere on the border between wakefulness and sleep where he realizes, with a warm, slow pulse of affection, that he ended up in bed with Dennis again. Not the most conventional path to the bedroom, and they didn’t have sex this time, but Dennis is still beside him.

And Mac has never felt more at home.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An uncomfortable truth finally comes out of the closet, and our heroes reach the climax of their story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Internalized Homophobia and Minor Violence tags are in full effect here, so grab your hard hats and dive on in.

How to prevent a hangover in two easy steps:

Step 1: Don’t drink Everclear the night before. Step 2: See step one.

Waking up the next day proves, with violent obviousness, that Mac has failed step one.

He finishes spitting up bile for the seventh time in two hours and drags himself back into bed, moaning ghoulishly into the pillow. If he cracks double-digits he’s just going to take a pillow and a blanket into the bathroom and camp out until his entire bowel system is floating in the toilet bowl.

Five minutes pass, and while his stomach is still voicing its complaints, Mac can effectively struggle into a sitting position without triggering another wave of nausea, as long as his eyes are scrunched shut. Dizzy and unfocused, he slaps a hand around his bed in search of his phone.

There’s no phone to be found.

And it’s also not his bed.

He cracks open his eyes, squinting against an infernal wash of sunlight. Dennis’s bed. _Again._ The man himself is nowhere to be found—the bathroom is empty, the other side of the bed is untouched. He can’t hear Dennis anywhere else in the apartment. And the chilling first thought that seeps into Mac’s mind is, _Goddammit, not again_.

 _Or maybe,_ and the thought sweeps up from behind like an arctic wind, _maybe he was never here at all._

A hard ball of ice settles in the pit of Mac’s stomach. He doesn’t _think_ , and evidence doesn’t suggest, that he had sex last night—but then again, he doesn’t know for sure. He doesn't remember if Dennis stopped by. What he does remember is him and Dee drinking in the living room—and Mac groans, because fuck, _him and Dee._ He’s at least positive that _they_ didn’t do anything, because Mac would have literally set himself on fire and it’s not like he could have woken up in Dennis’s bed if he’d burned to death the night before.

But he has _nothing_ to go on, nothing at all—like a scene abruptly cutting to black, his memory effectively stops short sometime after he and Dee each cracked open a second bottle of Gatorade. Mac’s used to brownouts and can usually piece together a night after one, but this is a level of blackout he hasn’t seen since high school.

Heaving himself upright, Mac slouches over the edge of the bed and squints at Dennis’s alarm clock. It’s midafternoon, so he’s beyond doing anything productive today. But before he can figure out a game plan for the rest of the day that doesn’t involve curling around a toilet seat, something peculiar catches his eye. Next to the alarm clock is a glass of water—but next to that, what really gets Mac’s attention, is an orange prescription pill bottle made out to one Dennis Reynolds.

Mac picks it up. It’s familiar: Dennis’s remaining supply of Percocet from a wisdom tooth extraction a few years ago. Except they keep all their extra drugs in a shoebox in Dennis’s closet, not stranded out on nightstands for the world to see. He stares at the bottle for what the alarm clock tells him is two minutes, utterly convinced this is a trap and Ashton Kutcher is hiding under the bed or behind the shower curtain, ready to punk him the second he uncaps the bottle. With a furtive glance around the room, he unscrews the bottle and tosses two pills back, chasing them with the water.

Twenty minutes later and he decides it’s the best thing he’s ever done, even if he’s not sure how the bottle got there. Still, he’s got an idea, and before he can chicken out of doing it—

“Yeah?”

“Hey.” Mac kind of misses cord phones. Something to mindlessly twirl around in his hand would be good right now. He breathes out shakily and says, “Um. It’s me. Mac.”

“I’m aware of who this is.” Dennis… does not sound happy. Shit. They’re still fighting, Mac remembers, with a dull ache at the back of his chest.  “What do you want?”

“I, uh. I think.” He bites the inside of his cheek. “Dee knows where our drug stash is, dude.”

He can practically hear Dennis measure out a slow, disbelieving blink on the other end of the phone. “Uh huh.”

“Like. Okay, let me explain,” Mac says, rushing for no real reason—before Dennis can hang up on him, that’s probably it. It doesn’t help him any. “I don’t really _remember_ what happened last night, but I _do_ remember me and Dee were up drinking—”

“You and Dee, huh.”

“Yeah, I don’t, um.” Mac squirms on the bed. That he texted Dee first isn't _that_ important. “I’m not really sure why she was over, she was probably on her period.”

“Lovely.”

“Totally. Chicks are so gross, man,” Mac says with a weak laugh. “Anyways, she was over here, drinking all our booze or whatever, and I think she got me blackout drunk, because I literally _do not_ remember a thing from last night. Like at _all_.”

There’s silence, then a soft rustling, and Dennis’s voice comes through, muffled by static. “You don’t remember anything?” he says.

“Yeah, it’s pretty embarrassing,” Mac admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “But I legit blacked out last night. Nothing happened, though, like, the bathroom’s pretty clean. Really clean, actually. I might’ve done that.”

Dennis sounds like he’s choking on the other end of the line. “That’s—that’s just _great_ , Mac,” he says. “That’s just great.”

“But like, I think _Dee_ must’ve found our drugs or whatever, ‘cause I found your Percocets on your nightstand when I woke up.” He pauses. “Also, she stripped me and dumped me in your bed—I guess it was closer. I didn’t ralph in it, though.” Another pause, and some fidgeting to go with it. “And I also took two of your Percocets. Sorry. They helped, though. I’m not hungover. Well, I am, but I don’t care now. Doesn’t hurt, I mean.”

He hears Dennis exhale very, very deeply. 

“I’m gonna move your stash, all right?” Mac says. “I dunno if she stole any. I’ll check.”

“It’s fine, Mac.”

“Dude, we spent years on that stash, we can’t just—look, I’ll stick it in my room for a bit until you get back.” He hesitates, biting his lip. “When are you getting back, anyway?” No answer. “Dennis?”

“I don’t know, Mac,” Dennis says.

Mac twists the bedcovers in his hand. “You’re still mad at me.”

“Look, I really need to go—”

“Yeah, no, it’s fine, I just. Thought you’d wanna know,” Mac says. His voice is small and defeated and he hates it.

“And I appreciate you telling me,” Dennis says, sounding more harried than appreciative, “but—”

“No, no, you go do your thing. You go,” Mac says, swallowing disappointment like a cold lump of lead. “I’ll be here, if you ever wanna—”

Dennis hangs up on him.

“Talk,” Mac says.

He tosses his phone on the bed and threads a hand through his hair, closing his eyes. God. He can’t keep this shit up anymore, any of it: the grain alcohol, the blacking out, the wall around Dennis he can’t seem to crack. He needs to stop. He needs a stiff drink.

He needs to get his job back before he texts Dee again.

—

Frank opens the door with a scowl plastered to his face and half of what’s left of his hair wrapped in aluminum foil. “What.”

“Hey! You are home. I tried calling,” Mac says.

“I’m busy.”

“I can tell. What’s with the—” Curious, Mac traces a loop in the air.

“I’m dyeing it,” Frank says. His brow furrows. “What do you want?”

“I came to beg for my job back,” Mac says, and he clasps his hands together in picture-perfect penance.

Arching an eyebrow, Frank searches Mac up and down, narrows his eyes sharply. “Beg, huh.”

“Frank, after the night I had, I will literally do _anything_ to go back to work,” Mac says. The thought of another night succumbing to loneliness and getting white girl wasted with Dee sends a nasty shiver down his spine. “You want me to finish dyeing your hair for you? I used to help Mrs. Kelly with her hair all the time.”

“Don’t even _think_ about touching me,” Frank says. His mouth presses into a firm line, but he steps out of the doorway and back into his apartment. “You got ten minutes.”

“Great! Thank you _so_ much, Frank, I really appreciate it.” Frank snorts and trudges back to what he and Charlie have clearly mistaken for a passable bathroom mirror. “Okay, so I was thinking—”

“You fix shit with Dennis yet?”

Mac winces. “About that—so technically _no_ , but that’s because—”

“Then what the shit do you have to bargain with?”

“We can find someone else to replace him,” Mac says. “Or better yet, to save you the time and trouble it would take to find someone, I can do that for you! I used to know a ton of college kids up at Temple, they’re always looking for odd jobs and shit.”

“Eh,” Frank says. “Pass.”

“Pass? What do you mean, ‘pass’? I’m literally offering to do all the grunt work for you,” Mac says. He throws his hands out at his sides in his frustration. “Don’t tell me you _want_ Dennis to keep working at Paddy’s.”

“He’s a decent schemer,” Frank says, squinting at his hair in the mirror. “Better than you are, anyway.”

“What—I can scheme!” Mac says. “I come up with great ideas all the time! I thought of the underage drinking scheme!”

“Wasn’t here for that one.”

“I—okay, remember that time I started a band? And I made you part of the band and I kicked Dennis out? That was my idea, remember?”

“Oh yeah, what were we called again?” Mac catches Frank sneering in the mirror. “‘The Pecan Sandies,’ like I _suggested?”_

“Frank,” Mac says, “if you want me to start a band with you and name it The Pecan Sandies, then that’s perfectly fine, but—”

“Of course I don’t wanna start a band with you, nitwit. And we did that scene already, that’s old news. At least _Dennis_ listens to my suggestions.” Frank wraps a dyed strand of hair in a piece of cheap foil, while Mac fumes quietly behind him.

He flops down on the pullout couch. “Well if _Dennis_ is so great, why don’t you go hire _him_ back instead,” Mac says.

“You kidding me? I go out and hire Dennis back,” Frank says, “and all he’s gonna do is _bitch, bitch, bitch_ about _you_ and your little _gay_ crisis. And I am _through_ hearing you and him bicker like a couple of old biddies. You two started this mess, you two are gonna fix it, and I won’t hear shit about it until you do. From _either_ of you.”

“Well, that’s what he does,” Mac says, carefully ignoring the part where Frank dumped all the blame on their shoulders. “He bitches. About everything.”

Frank grunts.

“I’m not even gay, you know? It was totally his idea.” Mac eagerly leans forward. “And you know what? Now that I think about it, I bet he’s just mad that he didn’t turn me gay. Like, he was _so set_ on the idea of turning a straight guy, and he’s really just mad that it didn’t work out like he thought it would. God, he’s _so_ pathetic. But that’s him in a nutshell, I guess. Typical.”

To Mac’s surprise, Frank is laughing, even as he pats more hair dye onto his hair. “You’re still on about that shit?” he asks.

“On about what shit?”

“The queer shit. You still don’t think you’re a bonafide butt pirate?”

Mac’s eyes bulge until they’re comically wide. “Uh, fuck _no_ I’m not,” he says.

“Bull.”

“It’s _not_ bull, Frank!” Mac says. “I’m straight as shit! If Dennis couldn’t change that, nothing can!”

“Mac,” Frank says. He isn’t mad, he’s amused. “You shittin’ me right now?”

“ _Why_ don't you people get,” Mac says, slamming his head back against the wall, “that I am straight,  _not_ gay, and totally attracted to bangable hot chicks? I mean _what_ is so hard to understand about that?”

“When was the last time you even banged a woman?” Frank asks, and with a deafening screech, Mac's train of thought skids to a halt.

“It’s... it's been a while,” he admits, “but that doesn’t make me gay. It’s a dry spell, people get those all the time!”

“Uh huh. Last time you asked a woman out.”

“Again, _dry spell_ , and the bar’s been busier than usual—and I’ve been at the gym a _lot_ more recently—”

“How about the last time you even _checked out_ a woman, instead of making goo-goo eyes at the first slab of prime beef to come waltzing in?” Frank frowns in the mirror, working over a stubborn mat in his hair as Mac tries to recover before it's too late. “We’ve all seen you do it.”

“Then you’re all reading _way_ into things,” Mac says; his mouth is dry and his courage has deserted him. “Like, even for you guys.”

“Oh yeah? I’m reading into the bodybuilding magazines Charlie found in a Ziploc in the toilet tank? The ones with the _sticky pages_ in the middle?”

Mac swallows, shifts uncomfortably on the couch. “Those could be anyone’s,” he says. “They could be Dee’s.”

“How many more years are you gonna keep this up?” Frank asks. “Outta curiosity. I wanna know how much longer I gotta put up with this.”

Mac furrows his brow, deeply baffled. “Huh?”

“Look, if you’re all good with fooling yourself the rest of your life, that’s your business,” Frank says, “but don’t expect anyone else to be any sympathetic and cover your ass. No one’s interested and _no one’s buying._ And your ten minutes are _up_. Hey Charlie.”

Mac glances over just as Charlie walks in and drops a plastic bag on the floor. “Frank, what the shit, man? I told you to wait until I got back!” Charlie grabs Frank’s wrists and yanks his hands from his hair.

“What? I got impatient.”

“You got dye all over your hands is what you got.”

“It’ll wash off,” Frank says, with a dismissive wave of a purplish hand. “You took too long.”

“I was gone for twenty minutes! You couldn’t wait twenty minutes for me to get gloves?” Charlie shakes his head, shoulders dropping, before he finally notices Mac sitting on the couch. “Hey, man.”

“That shit might be toxic, dude,” Mac says, with a nod at Frank’s hands. “He could lose a finger. Or all of them.”

“It ain’t toxic,” Frank mutters.

“Well you don’t know that, now, do you?” Charlie says. “Shit, do we have any like dish soap or Clorox or—”

“None. Charlie, it’s hair dye.”

Charlie touches his hands to his temples, lips a firm line of annoyance. “I’m not going back out again,” he says. “Go down to the corner store and get the strongest soap or bleach or detergent you can find, literally the strongest one.”

“You,” Frank says with a chuckle, “are taking this way too seriously—”

“Go down to the store before the flesh melts off of your body, for the love of God,” Charlie says loudly, and he rubs the bridge of his nose in frustration until Frank is well on his way down the hall. “Goddamn.”

“It’s probably not that toxic,” Mac offers, after a pause.

“I dunno about that, Frank usually buys the cheap shit.” Charlie turns the dye box over in his hand. “Yeah, it’s all in like, East German or something. Probably loaded with weird crap.” He sets the box down and turns to Mac, a hand on his hip. “Anyway, what are you doing here, man, you bored or something?”

“I actually came to beg for my job back.”

“Oh yeah? How’d that go?”

Mac frowns. “Not good. He said he’s not taking me or Dennis back until…” He trails off. Charlie may be his best friend, but he just had this argument with Frank. Some arguments are too exhausting to go through twice in one sitting.

This would be one of them.

Charlie leans back against the wall, looks Mac over with a careful eye. “You talk to him?”

“Who, Dennis?” A nod. “Nah. I mean, I called him earlier today, but that was because I think Dee stole drugs from us.”

An eyebrow rises. “And why would you think that?”

“Well, because—okay, I don’t remember why exactly, but for some reason I invited her over last night. And we got shitfaced—like, really shitfaced, I seriously don’t remember any of it. But when I woke up I found Dennis’s Percocets next to me, so I think she did it.”

Charlie blinks at him, remarkably owlish. “You found Dennis’s Percocets next to you when you woke up.”

“Yeah, from when he had his wisdom teeth taken out? We keep a stash.”

“And that leads you to believe Dee _stole_ drugs from you?” Charlie’s voice arcs high on the last syllable, twisting a in way that suggests Mac’s not the brightest knife in the shed.

Mac fidgets. “I mean, she could’ve left them there to throw me off, right? Or it was a warning, like, 'Be grateful I didn’t steal _all_ your drugs.' Dude, we’ve got a good amount saved up, she could make bank with the right connects.”

“Did you check?”

Mac doesn’t meet Charlie’s eyes. “I could’ve missed something,” he hedges. “Who else would’ve left them out?”

“Oh, I dunno,” Charlie says, “maybe Dennis?”

“Dennis wasn’t there last night. He’s staying—”

“At a hotel, I know. The Holiday Inn a few blocks from here.” Charlie fixes his gaze on Mac, pinning him to the couch with an unsettlingly sober look. “We showed up last night, him and me; Dennis wanted to get his Wii for his room. You guys were out of it, man.”

“Really?” Mac knows enough, at least, to sound properly embarrassed. “That bad?”

“Definitely not good.” Charlie’s expression softens in stages. “You hit the bottle pretty hard, man, I mean even for you. You didn’t look like you were enjoying it.”

“Of course not, Dee was there.” Charlie doesn’t find it amusing, so Mac drops the attempt at a joke. “I dunno, man, it was just… there’s been a lot of things on my mind lately.”

“Doesn’t sound too fun.”

“It’s not. I hate thinking about stupid shit,” Mac says. Then he hesitates. “Hey, serious question.”

“What’s up?”

Mac takes a deep breath. “Do you think… I know this is gonna sound totally dumb, but, do I seem… like, kinda gay to you?”

Charlie stares at him.

“I know, I know, you probably weren’t expecting that, but Frank was talking earlier and it kinda got me thinking—”

“Dude,” Charlie says, “absolutely.”

“—and so I was just wondering—wait. Serious?” Mac’s face doesn’t so much fall as it does crash from orbit. “You’re joking.”

“No, I’m dead serious,” Charlie says. “I thought you were gayer than like, I dunno, soy milk.”

“What the fuck,” Mac breathes. “ _How_.”

“How what?”

“How do I seem gay? Fucking how?” His hands clench into fists and he thumps at his thighs.

 “I dunno, you just seem kinda…” Charlie gestures, a vague roll of his wrist at Mac. “You know, gay. It’s not a bad thing.”

“Of course it’s a bad thing, dude! You think I’m gay!” Mac threads his hands through his hair in frustration, tugging at the strands.

“So?” Charlie shrugs, confused and more than a little annoyed that Mac’s taking this so on the chin. “Who cares?”

“I care! I care like a shitload, dude! I don’t want people thinking I’m gay!”

“Why do you care what other people think?” Charlie asks, disbelief riding high on his brows. “Dude, fuck other people. They think we’re white trash and alcoholics and like a ton of other shit.”

“They don’t think you’re gay, though! That’s pretty bad, Charlie, that’s pretty fucking bad!”

Charlie crosses his arms over his chest and gives Mac an evaluating look that really doesn’t and never has belonged on him. “So being gay,” he says slowly, “is worse than being an alcoholic, or white trash.”

Mac falters. “I dunno,” he says, “maybe? It’s up there.”

“I’d go with gay over white trash, if you ask me.”

“Well no one _is_ asking you, Charlie,” Mac says, needlessly cruel in hindsight. Charlie buffs it off with ease. “They’re asking me, because clearly something about me says I’m a _bonafide butt pirate._ ”

Charlie tilts his head back. “Bro, I’m not seeing your point.”

“Charlie,” Mac says, “I don’t _want_ to be gay.”

Charlie hesitates. Something flashes behind his eyes, something with a definite name—comprehension? Pity? Mac doesn’t want to know. But he stays quiet, watching Mac and waiting.  

“You don’t get it, man,” Mac says, lowering his voice. “I just… I don’t.”

Charlie’s eyes soften. “For any, like, specific reason, or…”

Mac’s shrug is small and bunched together. A specific reason, a million reasons; he gets flashes of memory here and there, colored red with pain, anger, hatred. Green-gray for confusion. Dark, empty black, loneliness like a void. Everything he hates trying to understand about himself, every ugly urge he tries to ignore—as far as rainbow flags go, it’s a bad one. “I mean, who _wants_ to be gay?” he says instead. “Like, who wakes up one morning and goes, ‘God, _make_ me gay. Line up your rainbow lightning bolt, zap me in the ass, and just gay me up.’ Who wants to deal with all that?”

“All that?”

One memory stands out and coalesces and he’s all of thirteen, sitting on another shabby couch, thirteen and glued to the TV with a new kind of fascination, to _He-Man_ or wrestling or _Top Gun_ with a pillow clutched over his lap. He’s thirteen and life’s heading in the wrong direction, careening down a path he knows instinctively can’t be the one for him. He’s thirteen and he wishes he’d never turned on the TV at all. “Look, if you could choose what you wanted to be, you’d be straight, right?”

“I dunno.” Charlie shrugs. “Do I get to make the Waitress a dude?”

“The Wait—what, no. Yes. I don’t know,” Mac says.

“Well, if the Waitress is a dude, then yeah I’d go gay for her or him or whatever,” Charlie says. “Unless it’s like a full moon-type situation, and she’s the one turning _me_ gay? See, in that case, I don’t think it would work out, ‘cause I don’t typically associate with wolves so much.”

Mac fixes Charlie with a thousand-yard stare. “You don’t associate with wolves,” he says.

“Yeah, they’re too finicky for my tastes?” Charlie says. “Maybe if I could turn into some sort of werecoon instead, _that_ might get something going for us.”

“A were _coon?”_

“Yeah, like a were _wolf_ , but instead of a wolf I’d be a raccoon,” Charlie explains. “They have opposable thumbs, you see, and I feel like I’d make a better lesbian if I still had my thumbs.”

Mac is flabbergasted. “Lesbians don't _actually_ turn into werewolves, Charlie. _Or_ raccoons. And, what, you’d go gay for her just like that?”

“Of course!”

“You’d seriously pick gay over straight. You’d just… be _okay_ with that. With people knowing you're gay.”

“Dude,” Charlie says, “it’s the _Waitress_ ,” like that explains everything.  

“That’s not what I—forget it,” Mac mutters, and shoves himself hard into the couch. He doesn’t have a Waitress to go gay for.

He doesn’t have a choice in the matter anyway, and he knows that. He’s always known.

Charlie watches him for what feels like a long time. He only moves to dig out a couple of beers from the hollowed-out inside of an old speaker; uncapping one, he holds it out to Mac. Mac accepts without comment.

Charlie takes a quick pull. “Not like you’re asking,” he says, “but I really couldn’t care less if you’re gay.”

Mac stares at his beer like it has all the answers.

“Okay?” Charlie continues. “Be whatever you want, none of us give a shit. Just—man, stop beating yourself up over it. That’s gonna get you nowhere in life.”

“Like you know about getting somewhere in life,” Mac says sullenly. It’s meant to hurt. Mac needs someone else to hurt with him.

Charlie merely frowns, watching Mac in a peculiar way. “You’re not going anywhere either, buddy,” he says. “Gay, bi, whatever you are. You’re with us.”

Mac winces much less than he’d expected when Charlie says it, the dreaded G-word (with its less hot cousin the B-word in tow—not like Mac hasn’t flirted desperately there either, at least to make it easier to pretend). He sits there and his cheeks and neck heat up and he drinks room-temperature beer instead of saying anything in return, like _I’m not gay_ , or _I don’t even_ want _to be gay,_ or _Fuck you for making this so hard to ignore._

Everything was so much nicer when his friends played along. Everything was so much simpler; there weren’t any labels to fear, no expectations to let down, no one to disappoint. Life was supposed to go your way if you followed the right path, if you were a good boy and you said your prayers at night and you kept telling yourself it was just a phase, that you’d wake up one morning with a safe sense of acceptance, a reward for all your faithful suffering.

It’s for other people (and he is not other people). It’s for boys who dress like girls and wear makeup and body glitter (Mac's stolen Dennis's expensive mascara and Charlie's cheap roll-on glitter but he was just _messing around_ , he went right back to badass muscle shirts and badass combat boots, and he dressed and walked and talked like a badass man should). It’s for kids who got shoved into their lockers, called fags, beaten up (Mac was never shoved, Mac _did_ the shoving, he was seventeen and he shoved this one asshole, greaser dago punk with oil-slick hair and a mean right hook; Mac went home with a black eye and his shattered sense of pride and he jerked off to the thought of getting roughed up like that again). It’s for men who tell the world that they’re here, and they’re queer, and expect the world to get used to it (and what do they do that's gonna make the world play nice, huh? They march, they have pride, they ask to get married, and there will always be people who hate them). It’s for other people (please, God, does he have to do this), and the world does not get used to it (and he is scared of what the world will take from him next).

Mac doesn’t want to be other people. Even if Charlie tells him it’s okay.

“I think I’m gonna head out,” he says. “Thanks for the beer.”

Charlie raises his bottle in goodbye, and Mac heads out to the street. He stands on the sidewalk for a moment. A chill whispers over his skin; the sun is just starting to set.

He glances down at the beer bottle still in his hand; he's thirteen, he's seventeen, he's almost forty and still waiting for that reward. He isn't thinking when he curls his fingers around the bottle's neck, or when he draws his arm back, or when he hurls the bottle at the apartment building. He watches it shatter into jagged brown pieces like the first moment of exacting revenge, the cold satisfaction of telling someone  _fuck you_ , and suddenly everything’s going his way for one electrifying moment.

The next few moments are what it feels like after, when reality sinks in; when you’re staring at broken pieces on the floor and wondering why that felt good to begin with. Nothing's changed, after all. He just stopped pretending it ever could.

Mac starts walking, without direction or purpose, and the shadows stretch far behind him.

—

He doesn’t realize he’s a block away from the Holiday Inn until he’s—well, a block away from the Holiday Inn. How he got here is mostly on accident. He’s also not that far away from his own place, and he tells himself that he would have turned tail and left had he not spotted a familiar set of dishwater blond curls, and simply _needed_ to investigate the matter further.

He can tell it’s Dennis from about fifty feet away—it’s something in the way he carries himself when no one’s actually watching, when he can be a little less poised and glaringly perfect. Dennis has his hands jammed in his jean pockets, and he’s staring intently at a vending machine.

Mac’s breath catches, and his heart starts to pound. Goddammit, it’s not like he _missed_ the sonofabitch.

He shoves those feelings back where they came from, takes a deep breath, strides over to the vending machine. Maybe puffs out his chest a little bit. He leans against the wall and waits.

Dennis glances at him, perfunctory; then again with some real surprise.

Mac takes time to check out the outside of the Holiday Inn. It’s not impressive. He acts like it’s the worst. “You’re hiding out… _here_ ,” he says, scowling two stories up as a lady shutters the blinds.

He hears Dennis snort. “Wasn’t hiding, pal,” he says. “I told Charlie.” Dennis jabs at a few buttons with his thumb.

“Oh, wow, you told Charlie. I had to hear about it from _Charlie_.” No answer from Dennis. A Snickers plops into the bottom compartment. “You know, I was hoping we could just move past this whole entire thing.”

Dennis continues to dismiss Mac and retrieves his Snickers from the vending machine.

“But no. You just had to run away and hide out here. Running away from your problems, like you always do,” Mac says.

“You came all the way out here to insult me in person?” Dennis says. “Aw, Mac, I’m flattered.”

“Dude, come on,” Mac says, his shoulders dropping in defeat, “can’t we just—I dunno, sit down and figure this one out, instead of doing the whole song-and-dance and pretending like shit isn’t weird with us?”

“Nothing is _weird_ with us.”

“You’re staying at a _Holiday Inn_ ,” Mac points out. “Dude, this isn’t like the other times, okay? We’re not just gonna forget about whatever and go back to being friends like we usually do. This time… it feels different. _Circumstances_ are different. They’re _circumstantial_.”

Dennis blinks at him; his perfect blank face could have been carved from marble. “You done now?” he says, and then he’s standing, retreating inside the Holiday Inn.

“What—no I am not _done_ —” Mac jogs after Dennis, catching up with him in six quick paces. “And who walks away when someone says they’re _not_ done? That’s way gauche, dude.”

“You don’t even know what gauche means,” Dennis says, dry and unamused. He reaches his door and keys himself in. “Mac, you can’t even _spell_ gauche.”

“Yeah I can: _G, O, S,_ _H, E._ See Dennis, I'm not _stupid_ like you think,” Mac says. 

“Clearly,” Dennis says, unimpressed. He leaves the door unlocked, so Mac follows him in; Dennis tosses his wallet onto the dresser and sits on the lone bed in the room. His Wii is hooked up and there's something paused on Netflix—hopefully not something Dennis promised to watch with Mac one day. Insult to injury, at the very least.

Dennis is halfway finished peeling the wrapper from his Snickers when he glances up, surprised to see Mac still standing in the entryway. “Did you need something else?” he asks. “Or were you just in the mood to harass me?”

Mac unconsciously rubs his forearm, thumb skating over his tattoo. “Me trying to talk to you is harassment now,” he says. Dennis shrugs easily, tossing the candy wrapper on his nightstand. “Bro, will you just—”

Words are hard to come by. But that’s Dennis’s job anyway; Mac comes up with all the great ideas and Dennis nurtures them into workable plans. That’s how they are, that’s just how they function. Doe-eyed, Dennis tilts his head, the candy bar sticking childishly out of his mouth.

“I just don’t know why you’re mad at me,” Mac says finally; the words are simple and painfully plain but they’re there, and Dennis is paying some sort of attention. “After we’d experimented I thought the plan was to go over shit, you know, talk shit out. I had things I wanted to tell you.”

Dennis chews thoughtfully. “Like what?”

Mac ducks his head, sucks in his cheeks. “It wasn’t important,” he says.

“It must’ve been _something_ , if you were willing to come out all this way to annoy me about it.”

“Whatever, dude, you didn’t even wanna hear me out in the first place.” His gaze narrows to a sharp glare, one Dennis returns impishly, a gleeful brat with a magnifying glass and an ant hill at his mercy. “Like you've ever really given a shit.”

“I’m giving a shit now,” Dennis points out. He’s never been good about rising to the bait, that was always more Mac’s thing. “Come on, Mac, I wanna be buddies again. Let’s talk, okay? Let’s you and me _talk_.”

A vein twitches in Mac’s jaw. “You’re mocking me?”

“Of course not!” Dennis says. “I just recognize that this is _totally important_ to you, and I wanna be a _good friend_ , okay? I feel bad for you.”

“You’re _smiling_.”

“Am I?”

Mac’s hand curls into a fist. “Dude, I came to you with a legit problem and you’re acting like—like I’m a little kid!”

Dennis tries to reverse the smile blossoming rapidly on his face. “Dude, _no_ ,” he says, not at all convincing, “come on, this is—this is legit, all right? It’s too legit to quit.”

“Don’t you drag MC Hammer into this,” Mac snarls. “What’s your fucking problem, man?”

“ _Nothing_ , Mac—”

“You never take me seriously,” Mac says, brain doing a mental wince when the blow backfires and Dennis chokes back a laugh, his eyes glowing with the embers of malice. “You know, sometimes I don’t even know why I’m fucking friends with you, man.”

That does catch Dennis a little; his smile dims, and the sheen in his eyes grows dull. “Mac, come on. You gotta admit, it’s a little funny.”

“I don’t gotta admit _shit_ , Dennis.”

“Fine, have it your way.” Dennis swings his long legs onto the cheap bed and takes another bite of his Snickers. “I was gonna listen to you, but if you’re wimping out on me like this—”

“You’re the one who’s being all—fucking obtuse and shit!”

Dennis arches an eyebrow. “Good Lord,” he says, thoroughly impressed, “you buy a dictionary before you came here?”

“We’re getting away from the point again,” Mac growls.

“Which is?”

His fingers tense, flex. “You walked out.”

“Here we go.”

“You _promised_ ,” and Mac stabs a finger at him, jaw clenched, “that you wouldn’t _ditch_ me after we fucked.”

“First off, I promised you _nothing_ ,” Dennis says. His eyes have taken a hard turn. “Got it? Second, either I’m living in an alternate universe or I didn’t _ditch_ you, as you so kindly put it, _after_.”

“You acted like nothing happened when it fucking _did._ ” Dennis drops his head back against the wall. “What was with all the deflection the morning after? Or the goddamn _scene_ you made at Paddy’s—”

“ _I_ made a scene—”

“—Dee had to drag you out of the back office before you’d even _acknowledge_ that shit went down,” Mac spits. “Christ, man, it was like you didn’t fucking _care_.”

Dennis eyes him, cold and calculating. “You want to talk about the morning after.” Then he smiles, and it’s sharp. “And you were worried _I_ was going to be the girl.”

Mac launches himself at Dennis with his fist already pulled back. He misses, a lucky dodge on Dennis’s part, but his elbow stabs hard and fast into Dennis’s shoulder. With a winded grunt, Dennis jerks his knee into Mac’s solar plexus.

“Take it back!” Mac wheezes as he throws another punch. “You take that the _fuck_ back!”

“You’re a prissy little _bitch_ who—ow, _fucking_ , sonofa _bitch_!” Mac finally lands a hit square on Dennis’s jaw. Like an angry jackrabbit Dennis kicks his legs up and Mac goes flying off the cheap bed. Drab standard-issue carpet slams hard into his tailbone, and he tumbles backwards with a startled yelp.

With a quiet hiss, Dennis rubs at his injured jaw. There’s a really spectacular bruise already starting to blossom, and in between stabbing gasps of air as he holds in his battered abdomen, Mac is silently proud of his handiwork. He hopes something _cracked._

Dennis spits out a gob of blood. It misses Mac’s ankle by a mere inch. “You’ve got some real anger issues, you know that?” he says, with a terrible dark look, and Mac almost springs up ready for round two when a knock on the door catches him off-guard. Mac glances at Dennis, who's still glowering at him, swiping at his mouth like a seasoned fighter. Needing to put physical distance between themselves, Mac hauls himself up and limps over to the door.

There’s a pimply-faced teenager with a brown paper bag grinning weakly at him. “I, uh, I tried calling,” he says, “no one was answering the number, but I heard voices, so—”

“Move.” Dennis shoves Mac out of his way; Mac’s shoulder knocks hard into the wall. His eyes are fixed on Dennis as he thrusts a crumpled bill into the kid’s hand, growls at him to keep the change, and slams the door shut in his face. He brushes past Mac with the bag and drops it by the nightstand, then sits back down on the bed.

The bruise is by now unmistakable, a rosette of storm-cloud purple blooming from jawline to cheekbone. Triumphant, Mac leans against the wall and soaks in the victory, the thrill of it cold and clean.

For a minute or two. It fades like everything else, until it’s nothing but a dull, muddy pulse in the back of his mind. Dennis rubs at his jaw in short strokes, occasionally wincing, breathing in careful little gasps. Mac sinks down to the floor, his legs bent protectively before him.

His stomach rumbles.

Dennis snorts. “Well I’m not surprised,” he says.

Mac scowls at him. “Dude,” he says, “I haven’t had anything except a beer like all goddamn day.” He settles against the wall, as though if he squirms around enough it’ll open up and safely absorb him before Dennis can start in on the fat jokes. “Not so easy to keep shit down when you’re puking your guts up every ten minutes.”

That may have been an exaggeration. And it’s in the past at any rate, because whatever Dennis ordered is making his mouth water for something savory and greasy and sweet.

“And whose fault is it for getting blasted the night before, huh Mac?” Dennis says snippily. He tries working his jaw and hisses through his teeth, and Mac tells himself that Dennis deserves it.

He bites his tongue. “Dee’s.”

“Okay, buddy. _Sure_.”

They sit and glare at each other in silence for two minutes, until Mac’s stomach lets out another petulant growl.

Dennis narrows his eyes. “You seriously haven’t eaten anything today,” he says.

“Except for the beer at Charlie’s, yeah.”

“How do you eat a—” Dennis shakes his head, closes his eyes. They’re still shut when he lamely kicks at the bag. It scoots closer to Mac by only a couple of inches, but the point is made stunningly clear.

Mac stares at the bag like it’s been poisoned. “Dude,” he says.

Dennis glares at him; charitable acts are rare as unicorns on his part, but he doesn’t take kindly to anyone rebuffing them, as if his magnanimity is so precious it should be treasured without question. “Your stomach’s not gonna shut up otherwise, and it’s not like _I_ can exactly enjoy it now.” He points rather viciously to the bruise on his jaw.

Still. “You’re sure,” Mac says.

“Will you just _take it_ ,” Dennis says in exasperation, “and stop asking questions?”

“We could share—” One side of Dennis’s mouth presses into a grim line, so Mac shuts up and meekly stretches an arm out, dragging the bag over by the handle. The white Styrofoam carton inside is stuffed full of sticky, warm orange chicken. Mac literally moans.

He ignores the accompanying plastic fork and uses his fingers, and in under a minute a fourth of the carton’s contents are gone. He looks up to at least try to convince Dennis to take some, but is met with the kind of disgust people watch the gross-out round of _Fear Factor_ with.

“It’s really good,” he says through a mouthful of chicken.

Dennis’s nose is wrinkled with distaste. “Don’t talk,” he says.

“You’re sure you don’t want any? Don’t tell me all you had today was a Snickers.”

Dennis shrugs, settling back on his palms. “Dude, I’m fine,” he says. “Dunno why I ordered that shit, to be honest. I didn’t actually want it.”

“Okay, but you need like, something with actual protein besides Snickers nuts, bro—”

“Hey, Mac?” Mac looks up. “I know you’re not used to the concept, but you’re actually _doing me a goddamn favor_ here, so why don’t you shut up and finish and don’t talk with your mouth full like a mannerless savage, okay?”

Mac stuffs another piece of chicken in his mouth and mumbles that he’s not a mannerless savage. Dennis just shakes his head.

A third of the orange chicken remains by the time Mac decides he never even wants to see a chicken again, and he closes the lid and sets the carton delicately back into the bag. He settles back into the wall, feeling warm and full. It’s a pleasant, easygoing feeling, and he lets his eyes fall closed.

It almost makes him forget he and Dennis are Dealing With Something.

“Thanks,” he mutters.

Dennis snorts. “You yak it up, you’re cleaning it,” he says.

They’re quiet, listening to a car pulling out, a woman yelling obscenities about a football team upstairs.

“I wasn’t gonna turn into a girl on you,” Mac says.

It’s sheer dumb luck that Dennis doesn’t immediately laugh him off, or launch them right back into the fray. “No?” he asks, and it's not as skeptical as Mac expected.

“No,” Mac says. He rolls out a crick in his neck and hangs his wrists over his knees. Dennis’s poker face is watching him when he cracks open his eyes. “I really wasn’t.”

“Really.”

Mac offers a shapeless half-shrug. “I wasn’t gonna ask you, ‘okay, where do we go from here’ or ‘what are we now’ or ‘what does this make us.’ None of that.”

Dennis nods slowly, digesting the information. “So what were you gonna ask about?”

Mac’s quiet for a moment before answering. “Us, I guess,” he says. “Like. Were we still okay as friends, did you hate me, did we fuck _us_ up. I wanted to make sure you were still my best friend. If you even wanted to be friends.”

Dennis doesn’t say anything to that. He stares at a point just past his knees and doesn’t say a word.

“You got kinda weird on me,” Mac says. “For no reason.”

Dennis shifts, hunches over his thighs. “I didn’t know what to say to you,” he says. “I didn’t know what you wanted me to say.”

“Dude, you could’ve said anything,” Mac says. “As long as you said we were good.”

“You didn’t want me to change,” Dennis says. His tone is a limp, sad imitation of an accusation. “I thought—I mean the next day, everything went back to normal, right? Or started to? You were the one who refused to play along.”

Mac looks at him, resolute. “I don’t think I can play along anymore, Dennis,” he says, and Dennis pales, stricken. “Not if it means you’re gonna be like this and leave things hanging.”

Dennis blinks rapidly, and nods. “I see.”

It’s such a non-answer, it shouldn't hurt so much, and it does anyway, like a sledgehammer to the gut. He regrets the chicken, coming here, agreeing to the experiment in the first place, it all coils and crunches hard inside him. “Things changed, didn’t they,” Mac says.

The setting sun burnishes the room with fire-red, with crisp, rich gold. Dennis is invisible in coal-black shadow, only a dull shine where the eyes should be. The woman upstairs is laughing, so hard it sounds like she’s sobbing. “Don’t ask me that,” Dennis says quietly.

“I already did,” Mac says. He tilts his head back. “That’s it?”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know, man—did something change, did something _not_ change, are we still friends, are we _not_ …” He doesn’t need to finish, because Dennis flinches, and then he knows, and then he wishes he didn’t know. “Oh.”

“Mac, it’s not what you think—”

Mac is slowly shaking his head. “So,” he says. “Guess it’s really over.”

“Don’t—don’t be overdramatic, man.” But Dennis’s voice is wary.

“Makes sense, in a way. It's a punishment. I get it.” Mac knocks his head against the back of the wall, flicks his gaze to the cracked ceiling. “This _is_ Your doing, isn't it? Don't tell me, there really was a reward and I backed out too early to get it.”

“Who are you talking to?” Dennis squints at him. “God?”

“Who else? He answered my prayers.” Mac laughs, wholly unpleasant, the thin cry of someone about to jump off a bridge. 

“Prayers for what? Mac, what are you even being punished _for?”_ Dennis says, and that throws Mac off-course; of all people, it should be obvious to _Dennis_ most of all, there and present (and warm, and sighing, and making Mac stupidly happy and proud) since the very beginning.

“For you, dude!” he says. “We had _gay sex_ and I realized I’m gay and it messed up our _entire_ friendship, and it’s all because I agreed to this stupid fucking experiment in the first place. And _we_ can’t fix shit, so I just—I have to accept it now. That this is the way things are gonna be.”

“Mac,” Dennis says with some worry, “God doesn’t have _anything_ to do with this, okay? Not with you, certainly not with me—trust me, this?” He wags a finger in between them. “This one’s between you and me, buddy. God doesn’t _get_ to come between us.”

And just when Mac discovered a way out, too. That door slams in his face and he’s back in a room with flickering flaming light and Dennis is staring intensely at him from the cheap hotel bed. The sense of making sense, the order in the midst of chaos, is gone. “Dennis,” he says, with a wan smile, “that just makes it worse.”

How do you go about earning forgiveness without anyone punishing you in the first place? Mac is the wrong man to ask. But Dennis is so insistent that God isn’t touching their drama with a ten foot pole—and Mac would have run with that, happily, if it didn’t pin the blame squarely on himself.

So, what, he chose this? Dennis tempted him with an apple and paradise and Mac said yes. Dennis is the snake and the garden, and what Mac remembers about Genesis is this: Adam and Eve never saw either of them again.

Goddammit.

“I’m gonna head back, before it gets too dark,” he says quietly, but he doesn’t move.

“If I’d’ve known it would’ve bent you over the barrel like this,” Dennis starts, his mouth working strangely, unused to the mechanics of forming an apology.

It works out, anyway, because Mac doesn’t want one. He wants Dennis to be his friend again. He doesn’t want to be gay. He wants to go back to a time where he and Dennis just enjoyed a really close, intense friendship, not one that threw feelings into the mix and pressed _Blend_ until the motor burned out. He wants a lot of things, and what he has is knowledge, exile, and a faded recollection of what heaven looked like. His throat is dry and his chest is hollowed out. “I thought I got to do the bending,” he says.

Dennis doesn’t laugh. Whatever. It wasn’t even a good gay joke, but hey, he’s got the rest of his life to work on those. As far as consolation prizes go, it’s a phenomenally shitty one.

“So,” Mac says, standing up, “I guess this counts as patching things up. I’ll talk to Frank tomorrow, or whatever.” Dennis doesn’t respond. “See you at work.”

Mac’s halfway to the door when Dennis calls out to him, and he hurries back, hope fluttering in his chest.

Dennis nudges the delivery bag with his foot. “You forgot it,” he says.

The hopeful feeling is stuffed back in the box, and Mac locks it up and throws away the key. He picks the bag up from the floor, and then he walks away from Dennis for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I would've stayed in your bed for the rest of my life, just to prove I was right_   
>  _That it's harder to be friends than lovers, and you shouldn't try to mix the two,_   
>  _'Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you_
> 
> Liz Phair, "Divorce Song"


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dennis's grand plan for forgiveness runs into a hitch. The thrilling conclusion!

Mac’s been home for twenty-four and a half hours, trying to get a handle on his new life as a gay man, and as far as he can tell there's hardly been a difference. There’s disappointment, sure, a good deal of relief; the restless feeling of boredom that’s just expected when Dennis isn’t around, but everything else is the same as it ever was. He glances briefly at his phone again—no new messages—and tries to find Netflix’s “Gay & Lesbian” category interesting, but all they have are weird art house films he’s never heard of and doesn’t care about anyway.

Really, if Gay Mac’s life is going to be the same as it was before, why can’t Dennis still be a part of it? Why doesn’t he _want_ to be? The very thought is troubling, and Mac stubbornly hopes the gay agenda has something fantastic in store for him, if it thinks it can fill the void Dennis left behind.

He resists checking Dennis’s account to see what he’d been watching. Hopefully something pretentious and boring, like Mad Men, and he’s so annoyed with the snooty, stuffy Dennis of his mind’s eyes that he picks the first low-brow, juvenile movie he can find. It's the South Park movie. Good.

“Bet Dennis wouldn’t approve,” he mutters. “Watching kids’ cartoons. It’s so high school.”

That’s a lie and he knows it, Dennis loves South Park as much as he does. But he can’t let himself imagine the truth: Dennis sprawled out on the couch with him, marathoning South Park like they’re twenty-three again, their hands brushing absently every time they dive for the popcorn. He can’t think like that, or he’ll start to miss Dennis again and he’s really sick and tired of missing Dennis all the damn time.

If he can’t lie to himself about being gay anymore, he can at least lie and pretend Dennis hates everything about him. It’s almost even true.

Mac ends up dozing off during the Terrance and Phillip movie, and groggily comes to just as the kids are wondering what Brian Boitano would do. Something taps against his window.

That’s odd. He pauses the movie and cranes his whole body to listen. Another tap on the glass. They’re two stories up, so it’s probably not a person—a rock, maybe? Who the hell throws rocks at windows anymore? And God help the poor sonofabitch if the window’s scratched, he knows for a fact Dennis skipped out on apartment insurance and windows sound like they’re expensive to fix. Walking over to the window, Mac rolls up the blinds; even after his eyes adjust to the darkness, he can’t see anyone out there.

He opens the window and a sharp rock bounces off the screen an inch in front of his nose.

“What the—” He looks down. “Yo!”

“Fucking finally!” a voice calls from the deep void below. It’s thin and strained, like it’s been shouting for a while.

“Hey shit-for-brains, haven’t you heard of a _telephone?”_ Mac calls out.

The voice responds, in an irritated tone, “Fucking check yours, asshat!”

Confused, Mac retreats from the window and checks his phone. There are no less than six voicemails and fifteen increasingly agitated texts from Dennis waiting for him.

Heart pounding, Mac returns to the window. “Dennis?”

“Who the fuck else would it be? _Yes_ , Dennis!” Dennis yells.

“Dude! Don’t you have your key?”

“Yes, but—look, are you doing anything right now?”

Mac glances back at the laptop. “Who wants to know?”

“Bro, just give me ten minutes,” Dennis calls up to him, and since he’s seen the South Park movie already and isn’t about to chance sleep when Dennis is possibly armed with a whole round of sharp rocks, Mac leans against the window sill. What the hell would Dennis want with him, and at fuck o’clock in the evening?

Better question: what the hell would Dennis want with him at all? After last night Mac was sure he’d only ever see Dennis at the bar, until one of them couldn’t take it and went postal or moved to Alaska and broke up the Dynamic Duo for real. Still, Mac’s having a hard time denying how his heart stuttered and skipped a beat when he saw Dennis’s name splashed across his phone screen.

Dennis is fucking around in the trunk of the Range Rover. Mac can’t really see what’s going on, but the dim light of a nearby streetlamp sheds some orange-filtered comprehension on the scene below. Dennis lugs a heavy black box out of the trunk, then starts futzing with a much smaller box in his hands. “Mac,” he says, “you still there?”

“Yeah!” Mac shouts back, by now thoroughly enthralled.

Dennis shoves the small box into the big one and presses several buttons. “Yo, can you hear this?”

“Hear what?”

“Hear this fucking bulky piece of shit, apparently, goddammit,” Dennis grumbles at the big box. He dials a couple of knobs, kicks at the box, and then, like it’s being filtered through a long, thin tunnel, Mac can hear music.

“Dude,” he shouts. “Is that Hall and Oates?”

“Goddammit, _no_ ,” Dennis yells back, “it is not Hall and Oates, it’s—look, just shut up and listen, okay?” Dennis crouches in front of what Mac can finally make out as a beaten-up boom box that looks like Dennis literally excavated it from the ruins of a Radio Shack. The music grows stronger, and Dennis says, “How about now?”

“I’m getting something.”

“Finally.” Dennis shuffles the boom box closer to their apartment building. It’s not Hall and Oates, but it is vaguely familiar; Mac can't place the artist or the song but he remembers the soft warmth of Dennis's tenor, floating out from the shower from time to time. It's that kind of familiar, and Mac smushes his forehead against the window screen. “That better?”

“A little,” Mac says. “Are you _sure_ that’s not Hall and Oates?”

“It’s Phil Collins, you ass,” Dennis says, and even in the darkness Mac can make out the irritated twist of Dennis’s scowl. “‘Against All Odds,’ that ring a bell?”

“Not really.”

“Whatever, just—Mac, look, I wanted to tell you something,” Dennis says, “all right? It’s something important.”

A beat. “So am I listening to you or to Phil Collins, I’m not—”

“Do both, you idiot! Multitask! God!” Dennis shakes his head and rolls his shoulders like a swimmer readying himself for a heat. He squats behind the boom box, cracking his knuckles; then, with an undignified grunt, he hoists the boom box onto his shoulders.

Mac winces and bites at a knuckle. “Lift with your back, bro!”

“I got it,” Dennis snaps, wobbling as he tries to lift the boom box above his head. To say he manages it would be an overstatement; it ends up resting dangerously against his neck in a way that makes Mac’s spine shudder. “Are you listening to the lyrics?”

“Kind of? I can’t really hear them.”

“Because they’re about a man,” Dennis says, as though Mac had cried out _Yes!_ and was now hanging onto his every word, “telling the other half of his soul how sorry he is, and how much he regrets letting the only one who really knew him just walk on out of his life.” He stumbles and catches himself, the boom box weighing on him like a yoke. “And he knows he’s got no chance, but Mac, take a look at him now—‘cause he wants to make things right!”

Mac blinks at him. Huh. He never really paid attention to lyrics before—not like Dennis does, apparently. “So?”

“‘SO’?” Dennis screeches. “What do you _mean_ , ‘so’?!”

“Who cares? It’s a dumb love song, dude, they all sound like that. And I hate Phil Collins,” Mac says.

_“WHAT?”_

“Well, okay, hate’s probably a strong word, but I don’t, like, jam out to him that often. We’ve been over this.” He points at the boom box, as Dennis fights a desperate losing battle not to let it slip. “Yo, got any Nirvana on that?”

“Why in the _hell_ would I have Nirvana on a fucking— _FUCK!”_

And Mac never gets to find out if Dennis’s Phil Collins tape has any Nirvana on it, because the boom box lurches out of Dennis’s hands and, like the weight of the world, comes crashing down on his shoulders.

Mac cringes, hard.

—

“All right, easy, _easy_ , there you go—dude, don’t put pressure on it—”

“You think I’m _trying_ to put— _goddammit_ that hurts, Christ on a cross—”

“I told you.” Mac shoulders the apartment door open. “Don’t put pressure on it.”

Dennis glares at him so furiously that Mac’s surprised the skin doesn’t melt off his face. Mac guides and Dennis limps, and they shamble into the apartment as one barely-coherent unit. Mac lays Dennis down gently on the couch, biting his lip when Dennis groans quietly, his face screwed up with pain. He stands by the couch and waits.

Dennis relaxes, bit by bit. “God,” he mutters. “Last time I do something nice for someone.”

“What were you even doing, dude? Trying to serenade me? Because, and I can kinda say this now, that’s really gay, bro.”

Dennis’s lips twist into an irritable little scowl. “You know that movie _Say Anything?”_ he says. “With John Cusack and the hot chick with the weird name?”

“Probably?”

“Anyway,” Dennis says, “there’s that one scene where John Cusack holds up this giant boom box, and he goes to the hot chick’s bedroom and plays, like, Peter Gabriel at her until she lets him in, remember that?”

“But you weren’t playing Peter Gabriel at me.” A beat. “And that would make me the—dude, for the last time, I’m not a girl already!”

“I _know_ you’re not a girl,” Dennis snaps, “ _neither of us_ is a girl, goddamn. I’m _patently aware_ that you and I aren’t girls.” He shuffles into the couch like he’s mad at it, lips pursing. “I couldn’t find a Peter Gabriel tape. I picked something just as meaningful, okay.”

Wrinkling his nose, Mac perches on the edge of the couch. “Dude,” he says, “ _why_?”

Dennis sighs, long-suffering. “Worked on a girl in high school,” he admits. “And it worked for John Cusack. I don’t know, stop questioning my methods.”

And Mac does stop questioning his methods, because Dennis is moody and irritable when he’s in pain, and somewhere in the gnarled hedge maze he calls a heart, he was trying to make things right. Dennis gives out a dissatisfied grunt, then hisses, features screwing together as a sudden wave of suffering crashes over him.

Mac’s eyes widen. “That, um,” he says. “That looked pretty bad.”

“You think?” Dennis rolls his eyes. “And you know what, it's not _half_ as bad as the time some insecure _idiot_ tried to break my face yesterday.”

That stings, but Mac can't argue against it. “I _am_ sorry,” he mumbles, avoiding Dennis's eyes. “We can go to the hospital...?”

Dennis chirps a hand at him. “And pay out the ass for some haggard night nurse to tell me to ice it? I don't think so, pal.”

Mac pauses. “I still feel bad, though.”

“Well good for you, you should.” Mac is still miserably forlorn when Dennis cracks open an eye, and he sighs in defeat. “Look,” he says, “it's fine, all right, you didn't actually break anything. The goddamn boom box, on the other hand.” He aims a scowl at the window.

“I could take a look at your ankle, maybe.” A sharp shake of the head. “Or what about drugs? We’ve still got some stuff left,” Mac says. Before Dennis can answer Mac leaps off the couch, popping out of his room half a minute later with a beaten-up black shoebox in his hands. “Let’s see what we got, we got my Vicodin from when I broke my wrist, your wisdom tooth Percocet, a fortune cookie—I don’t know _why_ we have one but it’s there—the Xanax we bartered from the lady at Temple…”

He listens to Dennis’s quiet, defeated sigh. “How are we on Vicodin?”

“Still pretty good. I’d go with that too, we only got like four Percocets left. Unless it’s really bad.” He hesitates, worrying at his lower lip. “Is it?”

Dennis’s hum is barely audible. “Two Vicodins, doc,” he says, extending a hand, and Mac’s only too happy to share.

Dennis swallows them dry, which Mac always thought was both enviable and kinda gross. “You don’t want a beer to wash that down?”

“I’m good.” Dennis exhales, purposely slow; Mac watches the rise and fall of his chest like he’s waiting for something to go wrong. “Thanks.”

Mac fiddles with the orange bottle in his hands. “The night I blacked out,” he says. “The Percocet on your nightstand. That was you?”

“Who else would it have been, Charlie? _Dee?_ No, man, I left them out,” Dennis says. He shuts his eyes and settles back. “Grain alcohol, dude. Hangover’s a killer _._ ”

“They did help,” Mac murmurs; his heart feels all soft and tender as he stares down at their paltry personal pharmacy. “So that, and this.” He’s gesturing outside, where the boom box made its last stand; Dennis flinches, bracing himself, but this is important to Mac. “It all means… what, exactly?”

One eye snaps open to glare at him. “Are you gonna turn this into a thing?”

“Depends,” Mac says.

“On?”

Mac offers a light shrug. “On if you tell me why you really bailed. Why you were all fake-normal the next day and why you took off for a hotel. You really hung me out to dry, Den. You could’ve at least told me what was going on.”

Dennis sighs, and a hand goes to rub the bridge of his nose, something he only does when he’s beyond tired and past the point of caring. Mac sits up a little straighter. “No, man,” Dennis says, “I really couldn’t have.”

“Dennis, there is _nothing_ you can’t tell me. We’re supposed to, like, trust each other and shit.” There’s a significant pause, and then what’s been on his mind for the past twenty-four and a half hours smashes through the dam. “You weren’t starting to hate me, were you? After we had sex? I don't have a lot to compare it to but I thought we did pretty good together.”

“No, it was—Christ, you sure I have to do this?”

“Absolutely,” Mac says, and Dennis scrubs his hand roughly down his face.

“Fine,” he says, and shuts his eyes. “It wasn’t because I was starting to hate you.”

“Oh.” Well, that’s a relief.

Dennis lets go of a breath like surrendering a kite to a stormy gust of wind, shuddery and weak. His gaze flickers to the ceiling. “It was… the exact opposite,” he says. “If we’re being all honest with each other’s feelings and shit. The opposite happened— _had_ happened, rather. And after the experiment, it was a lot more impossible to ignore.”

Oh.

What’s the opposite of hate again? The first word that comes to mind, for some reason, is _no_ , but it’s never been more uncertain, more quietly hopeful.

“Oh,” Mac says. “You mean, like, you lo—”

“Please don’t say it,” Dennis murmurs. “Please.”

And he doesn’t. But the effect it has is exactly the same, a burst of light in a dark forest.

Mac coughs, on purpose, and nods at Dennis’s ankle, puffy and streaked a deep purple. “Dude, you should really see someone about that,” he says.

“It’s just a sprain, it’s fine. The Vicodin’s kicking in anyway,” Dennis says. There’s an uneasy silence, as Dennis tries to stop himself from wincing with pain, but he adds eventually, “You could bandage it, though. If you wanna feel useful or whatever.”

“I think I’ve got stuff in my room,” Mac says, happy for an excuse to take a minute and collect himself; his heart is fluttering and he can’t remember how breathing is supposed to work. Safe inside his bedroom, eager for anything else to do, Mac checks his phone.

Charlie called him four times. He calls back, residual nervousness feeding into new anxiety. “Charlie?”

“Dude!” Charlie’s relief washes through the phone. “Where the hell are you?”

“At my apartment?” Mac says, his voice rising in confusion. “Where else would I be? What’s going on?”

“I dunno, man, like I called Dennis earlier, and he was mumbling some weird shit, then he mentioned you and I was like, ‘Dude, are you okay, do you want me to come over there,’ and he was talking about Phil Collins, I think? And he said he had to go after you, and I was like, _Oh shit, he finally snapped,_ and I thought he was like, _after-_ after you or some shit—”

“Dude, Dennis is fine,” Mac interrupts. The knot of worry in his stomach relaxes. “Well, all right, he’s not _fine_ —”

“Ah shit.” Charlie’s sigh is heavy. “You two fight?”

“What? No, dude! Dennis just broke his ankle.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Or sprained it, I dunno. Looks pretty sick, honestly. In the bad way, not the cool way,” Mac says.

“How the hell did he break his ankle?!”

“He was doing a bit from a movie, I think, and—look, I really gotta get back, in case his ankle swells up and pops or something. It’s _really_ gross, man,” Mac says.

“Dude!” Charlie yells. “At least let us drive him to the hospital or something before he pops his ankle, we can be over there in ten minutes—”

“We’re good, no thank you, bye Charlie!” Mac tells the phone’s speaker before hanging up. He digs up the bandages and returns to his patient, who’s staring fuzzily at the dim laptop screen.

“South Park movie?” he asks, thick like his mouth’s full of cotton.

“Yeah, wanna watch? I can start it over.”

Dennis grunts, non-committal, which Mac takes as an invitation to unpause it where it is. He eases himself underneath Dennis’s legs, mindful of the swollen ankle now in his lap. Mac is careful when he slips off Dennis’s sneaker and sock, and gently pulls back the leg of his jeans. There’s a level of intimacy here that’s newly familiar, woven in the tenderness of Mac’s hands, and in light of recent revelations Mac finds he’s not as on edge as he could be.

He loves it, maybe. Time will tell.

He’s halfway through the first stabilizing loop around Dennis’s sole when he says, “Hey, Dennis.” He gets a quiet _mm?_ back, and pushes on with, “When you said ‘the opposite happened’… you meant that you had feelings for me? Like feelings-feelings?” Dennis doesn’t respond, and Mac tweaks his big toe. “Dennis?”

Dennis jerks his foot away with an immediate grimace. “Mac, if I _didn’t_ ,” he grumbles, “don’t you think I would have told you _no_ already?”

Mac smiles, one of the kinds he tends to keep to himself. His thumb rubs the once-bony knob of Dennis’s ankle. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he says, winding the bandage around pale skin. “Before, I mean.”

“You wanted to be friends,” Dennis says, so soft and worn that Mac almost doesn't catch it. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to shove _my_ shit back in a box anymore, but you didn’t want anything to change, so it didn’t. I didn’t let it.”

Finishing with the bandage, Mac tucks one end under a loop. He leaves Dennis’s legs sprawled across his lap, though, placing a hand tentatively on Dennis’s knee. “Dennis,” he says, “I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of change I can live with.”

Dennis’s eyes open, wide startled blue shaking out of an opioid haze. Mac’s smiling at him, and he must look so stupid, but he can’t help it. And he doesn’t want to, either.

“Seriously, Dennis, I—” And Mac is rudely cut off by another rock at the window.

“The fuck, buddy, some people are trying to— _Frank?”_ It’s hard _not_ to tell it’s Frank; he’s standing on the hood of his Cadillac and waving his arms as Charlie gears up to throw another rock. “The hell are you guys doing out here?”

“Is Dennis okay?” Dee sticks her head out of the driver’s seat window. “Mac! Can you hear us?”

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Mac says. “And _here?”_

“We were gonna take Dennis to the hospital before you finished him off,” Charlie shouts.

“Hey Mac!” Frank says, cupping his hands to his mouth. “You ice Dennis yet?”

“No! He’s alive!”

“Then where is he?”

Frustrated beyond reason, Mac rubs hard at his temples. “ _Obviously_ I’m not gonna make him walk out to the window, he’s got a busted ankle!” he yells. “He’s here though, I promise.”

“He hasn’t been answering his phone,” Dee says, holding hers up like Mac can see the screen. “You’re sure he’s not dead.”

“ _Yes_ I’m sure, goddammit Dee—he’s alive, I’m alive, we’re _both alive_ , we’re good now,” he says, hoping the last bit will shut them up and get them to leave. Behind him Dennis grumbles like an irritated cat.

“You’re good now,” Charlie echoes. “Like, you’re good-good?”

“’Cause last we heard, you guys were at each others’ throats—”

The hairs on the back of Mac’s forearms stand alert when a warm presence staggers up next to him, leaning heavily on his shoulder. Mac's arm wraps around Dennis's back as fast as lightning.

“Guys,” Dennis says, fuzzy and hoarse with pain and effort, “all of you, do me a favor and shut the fuck up, please? Okay?”

“Yeah, seriously guys,” Mac adds, casting a shameful look at Charlie, Frank, and Dee below. “He’s like, in actual physical pain and shit.”

Charlie's eyes widen. “Dennis! You in pain and shit?”

“Bro, you need us to drop you off at the hospital?” Dee beeps the horn of Frank’s car. “Also, you should try driving this thing when you get a chance, it’s a sweet-ass ride!”

“I’m fine,” Dennis tells them, “it’s a goddamn ankle sprain. No big deal.”

“Mac wasn’t trying to knock you off, was he?” Frank says. “Charlie said you guys got into some shit!”

“We did _not_ , Jesus goddamn Christ!”

Frank scowls. “You sure? Maybe you guys were trying to murder-suicide each other.”

“Murder-suicide, where in the _hell—_ ”

“We really don’t need you guys murder-suiciding each other, all right,” Charlie says, “you know how hard it is to find _two_ replacements for the Gang? One’s bad enough, but _two_?”

“Shit, you guys,” Dee says, “maybe Dennis tried to kill _Mac_ first.”

“Oh shit!” Charlie turns back to Mac and Dennis at the window. “Mac! Do _you_ need to go to the hospital?”

“No!” Mac shouts. “Dennis didn’t try to kill me first! And no one’s murder-suiciding anyone in here, okay?”

A beat. “Prove it,” Frank says.

A moment, then Dennis sighs, quiet like he’s reached a conclusion at the end of a long stretch of deliberation. He taps Mac’s wrist to catch his attention, then carefully positions him until their bodies tilt towards each other. With a look that would be apologetic if it weren’t pushed past the point of exhaustion, Dennis slips a hand behind Mac’s neck and into his hair. His other hand tips Mac’s chin up.

Dennis kisses Mac softly, without any fire or energy or passion. His eyes are closed and his lips are cracked and dry and Mac's eyes fall shut, shifting closer. Dennis sways a little after he pulls away, like he could collapse at any second, and Mac swears a new oath, just to himself, that he would’ve done anything for Dennis in that moment, anything.

He rushes to grasp Dennis by the hip, the shoulder. “You okay?” he murmurs.

Dennis briefly shakes his head, then turns and glowers out the window. “As you can all _clearly_ see, Mac and I are _just fine_ ,” he says. “Now all of you go away, I have a _sprained ankle_ and I’m done standing around on it to entertain you three stooges.”

There’s a pause down below. “We didn’t know you guys made up that much!” Dee yells.

“Yeah, man, you could’ve told us or something!”

“’Cause Charlie said you were talking about Mac and being all weird, we didn't know you meant _that_ kind of weird—”

“We were ready to walk into a bloodbath,” Frank finishes. “But you’re all good now?”

“YES,” Mac and Dennis shout.

“Well why didn’t you just do that in the first place? Dee, start the car,” Frank says, which Dee does with a palpable level of pleasure.

“Wait!” Charlie at least looks back at Mac, who suddenly feels lightheaded, a whirl of excitement spiraling behind his ribs. “Does this mean we’re allowed back at Paddy’s now that we made up?”

“What? Oh.” Charlie glances to Frank and Dee. They shrug. “Uh. Sure.”

“Okay, great,” Mac says. “Only we’re not gonna come back just yet, on account of Dennis has a sprained ankle and I’m gonna help take care of him and shit.”

“Just don’t, like, _actually_ kill each other, okay?” Charlie says. “Seriously, we _cannot_ afford to replace anyone.”

It’s a strangely heartwarming statement, though Mac isn’t sure Charlie meant it that way.

Mac and Dennis watch Frank’s Cadillac pull out of the street; then Mac slides an arm behind Dennis. He concentrates once more on guiding Dennis to the couch, but hesitates, eyeing the door to Dennis’s bedroom. “Dude, you should probably just go to bed,” he says. “You look beat.”

“We're finishing the movie,” Dennis grumbles, like he's not _that_ ready to call it quits. It's a stubbornness Mac allows tonight. Mac lays him down with care, fussing with his ankle until it’s comfortably elevated on an arm of the couch. With a quick detour to hit the lights, he picks a spot on the floor by Dennis’s head, dark blond curls gently brushing his ear.

He feels like leaning back a little, so he does. And he turns to face Dennis, because he feels like doing that too. “You’re sure you don’t wanna go to bed.”

“Positive,” Dennis says. His eyes are half-closed.

Mac snorts a laugh, and touches their foreheads together. “You’re pretty stupid,” he says.

“Your face is stupid,” Dennis says, automatic. And it’s comfortable. It’s familiar.

“Yeah,” Mac says. “Least you like looking at it, right.” Dennis hums, and Mac laughs quietly again, nestling closer when he thinks Dennis is about to fall asleep. Dennis makes this sort of approving little noise, like he’ll allow recent developments to continue, and Mac yawns, his own eyelids shuttering shut. “So we're friends again?”

“Yep.”

“Just checking. But I'm cool if you wanna do more.” Dennis makes a questioning hum, and Mac says, “More kissing, or whatever. If you want. But we have to stay friends too.”

“Whatever,” Dennis says, and then tacks on, “you're extremely weird, dude,” and Mac smiles to himself, settling closer.

Half an hour later, and already halfway asleep, a hand brushes past his face, pointing at the laptop screen. “See Mac, look,” Dennis says muzzily, “Big Gay Al is gay. And he’s fine with it.”

Mac is too tired to do anything more than chuckle softly. “Big Gay Al is supposed to be fine with it,” he says, “that’s why he’s Big Gay Al.” Big Gay Al twirls around a stage, singing about how super, thanks for asking, he is. “It’s in his _name_.”

“I’m just saying,” Dennis murmurs, “there’s a precedent for this kinda thing.”

“Man, I don’t know.” Mac tilts his head back, rubs his temple softly against Dennis’s hair; Dennis rumbles in contentment, nestles in close. “This is South Park, dude, I feel like the rules are different.”

“They’re not,” Dennis says. “Can you at least take it on faith that it’s gonna be fine for you? You’re good at taking things on faith.”

 _Everything is super when you’re gay!_ Big Gay Al sings. And Mac thinks, _Maybe._ He isn't quite buying what Big Gay Al is selling, but a _maybe_ won't break him. As long as he's got the Gang, his buffer for the shit the world likes to fling; as long as Dennis sticks around—Mac’s willing to contemplate a _maybe_. For such a small thought, it's a big weight that rolls off his shoulders.

It may not be a reward, but it doesn't feel like a punishment, either.

He hums. “Thought you science-types were all about experimenting,” Mac says.

“Jesus Christ,” Dennis mutters, with a soft little headbutt that doesn't at all hurt. Mac chuckles again, smiles.

They say nothing after that; Mac knows his back’s gonna kill him tomorrow if he falls asleep against the couch, but Dennis is out before the end of the movie and Mac doesn’t have the heart to wake him. Dennis’s breathing is soft and even in his ear—he’s back in the apartment, back home, right where he's supposed to be. Mac closes the laptop and closes his eyes and stretches backwards, rests his head gently against Dennis’s temple.

The last thought to run through his mind is, _It’ll be nice to wake up next to you tomorrow._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. According to the Gang's self-help book, Dennis indeed pulls the exact same 80s romance-inspired stunt on a girl in high school. His choice of Lionel Richie's "Hello," I thought, wasn't quite as fitting for this story. Also from the self-help book: Charlie actually assumes that Hall and—excuse me, _Holland_ —Oates wrote and performed "Against All Odds," which made for a fun, oblique reference.
> 
> 2\. The scene Mac and Dennis are watching at the end is the (slightly NSFW) song "[I'm Super](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYNuoCigGY)" from _South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut._ Excellent movie, watch it sometime if you've got a chance.
> 
> 3\. And we're finished! This was supposed to be a short, lighthearted piece in which Mac and Dennis have hilariously awkward sex and then Dennis apologizes with a _Say Anything_ reference. The rest of the story grew around those scenes, but as you can see, it had a mind of its own. Thank you to everyone who gave this fic a chance, especially if you went the extra mile and hit Kudos or left a comment or even just had a nice thought about a line or two. This was my first Sunny fic and the first serious work I've finished in a long time, and I'm glad to have shared it with you.


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